


Blue Monday (and Tuesday, and...)

by anonymous_yet_again



Series: Day by Day [1]
Category: Psych (TV 2006)
Genre: AU, Angst, Case Fic, Developing Relationship, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Hurt/Comfort, Multi, Non-Consensual Drug Use, but it has its moments, in that it obviously deviates from the show at some point, not as dark as it sounds from these tags
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-16
Updated: 2020-07-10
Packaged: 2021-03-04 00:54:08
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 11
Words: 20,641
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24755077
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/anonymous_yet_again/pseuds/anonymous_yet_again
Summary: A tale of smoothies, shiners, and unhealthy sleeping habits, not necessarily in that order. Also assaults, secrets, and psychic revealing nations (sorry, revelations). Who is assaulting and killing tall, dark men, why does Lassie seem to know so much about it, and why does Shawn care this much, anyway?____CW: This entire story is about a rape case and associated trauma, so be warned. No super graphic descriptions, but the implications are there. If I think a chapter merits a more specific or different content warning, I will include it. And if you think I missed something, please let me know.Title is based on the song "Blue Monday" by New Order. (Did I google "80s songs" to help me come up with it? Maybe.) Whole thing is written, updates 2-3 times per week.
Relationships: Burton "Gus" Guster/Juliet O'Hara, Carlton Lassiter/Shawn Spencer
Series: Day by Day [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1836364
Comments: 46
Kudos: 146





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> All right y’all, here’s the biggest warning on this whole thing: I’ve never watched Psych. All right, that’s not true--I think I saw some episodes in college with a friend? But I have no TV or streaming service right now, and I just sort of stumbled across the fandom in the form of fics. I have watched a whole lot of clips on YouTube, and I’ve read a lot of fanfiction.
> 
> I don’t know exactly when this is set because I don’t exactly know the timeline of the show! It is at least a few years into Psych (the agency) existing, and Carlton and Shawn in particular are at a friendly (but still antagonistic, of course) part of their relationship. This will almost certainly have inaccuracies or weird bits, because, again, I haven’t seen the show! But I had an idea, I wrote the idea, and since it’s written, I thought I should post it. Please forgive the weird bits.

A car door slammed. Carlton woke up. He flinched, opened his eyes, and took stock of where he was. This was in the driver’s seat of his Crown Vic, in the parking lot of the SBPD. He knew this immediately, because although his eyes had been closed and he’d been drifting, he hadn’t actually been all the way asleep, and had stayed at least peripherally aware of his surroundings. His neck hurt from the weird angle his head had slumped to. Actually, his whole body ached from sleeping in his car. It also ached from other things, but his mind just sort of slipped away when he thought far enough back for that, so he didn’t.

There was sun coming through his car window, which explained the warmth he’d been feeling on his cheek for the last--hour? He wasn’t even sure what time it was. On the other hand, the car door slam suggested people were arriving for work.

Carlton rotated his head carefully, stretched as well as he could within the confines of the driver’s seat, and then nonchalantly opened his door and stepped out. Then he squinted, cursed quietly, and bent back into the car to scrabble for his aviators.

He glanced around at the number of other cars in the lot as he headed inside, and then at the clock as soon as he made it to the bullpen. 8:12am; a pretty reasonable time for the Head Detective to be coming into work after a weekend off. He scowled at the desk officer and made a beeline for his desk. He needed to requisition a new cell phone.

“Carlton!” chirped O’Hara from her desk. He suppressed a jump; he hadn’t even realized she was in yet. “I _thought_ that was your car! Were you just sitting in the parking lot?”

“ _No_ ,” he scoffed, and turned his computer on, turning his scowl on it.

“Oh,” said O’Hara, giving him a weird look but not asking anything further. “I thought you had today off, anyway. What are you doing in?”

Carlton realized that he hadn’t taken off his sunglasses when he made it inside, which turned out to be a good thing because they hopefully hid a bit of his startled expression. It was Tuesday, right? He’d taken a well-deserved long weekend to go on a fishing trip, planning to head out on Saturday morning. Now it was Tuesday, the trip was over, he was back at work; except that when the computer’s home screen lit up, he saw the date and time. 8:17am, Monday. On the one hand, he was relieved that he hadn’t lost time. He’d basically done the opposite. On the other hand, it meant that the events of the weekend had been less than two full days long. It had felt like longer.

***

“For the last time, Shawn,” said Gus, following his friend through the station doors, “we are not installing a zipline from your _first floor_ apartment to the Psych office. _Especially_ not if we can’t get a case soon.”

“Re-lax, Gus,” said Shawn. “There’s a case here with our name dripping all over it, I can sense it.”

“Our name _written_ all over it,” said Gus, “and you have not heard it both ways.” Shawn ignored this, along with the look Gus was giving him, which said, silently, _I know you aren’t psychic, remember?_ Instead, Shawn made a beeline for Lassie and Jules’s desks, figuring he’d start there to see if they had any details he could read upside down from their case files. Or any station gossip; that alone was worth the trip, though Gus would probably disagree.

Jules looked a little frowny, which was unfortunate; even though they hadn’t worked out romantically, Shawn still didn’t like to see her unhappy. The frown didn’t actually look fully unhappy, though, more focussed. “How are my favorite detectives?” he crowed, trying to break her focus and maybe make her smile, and then got a good look at Lassie.

“Dude,” he said, “what are you, too cool for school?”

“What,” said Lassie without looking away from his computer screen. It didn’t actually sound like a question. He looked more focussed than Jules, even, but that was probably because he was trying to read whatever was on the screen through the tinted lenses of his aviators.

“You know,” said Shawn, and did a little dance step that put him right on Gus’s toes, and kind of accidentally in between Gus and Jules, cutting off his friend’s little wave. “How’s that song go? _I wear my sunglasses at night, so I can, so I can_ …”

“It’s not nighttime,” Gus pointed out, sidestepping him neatly. Shawn shot him a quick frown for shooting him down instead of picking up the song, and Gus shot a glare back. Interesting. He must have been really invested in that little wave. “But, uh, Lassie, you probably don’t need those inside.”

Lassie’s hand went to his face, almost as if he hadn’t realized the sunglasses were still there, and then he pulled them off and somehow managed to catch Shawn, Gus, and Jules all in his glare. “There. Happy?” Shawn thought this was a little unfair, because Jules, at least, hadn’t said a thing about his sunglasses, but he was distracted from this by a bigger concern.

“Damn, Lassie,” he said, at the same time as Jules breathed, “ _Carlton_.”

“ _What_ ,” said Lassie again, still not actually raising his voice to make it a question. “Let me _work_ , damn it.”

“That’s a hell of a shiner, Lassie,” said Gus cautiously, again putting into slightly more diplomatic words the thing that Shawn was trying to convey.

“Is that related to why you’re back now?” said Jules, and Shawn suddenly remembered the tail end of a conversation he’d heard at the same time as he’d been talking to Buzz the week before. Something about an extra day off, and fishing. So Lassie wasn’t supposed to even be there this Monday.

“No,” said Lassie. He touched the shiner cautiously, similarly to the way he’d first felt for the sunglasses, but shifted his entire body back towards his computer screen at the same time, which seemed like a pretty effective way of ending any conversation--if he hadn’t been talking to one Shawn Spencer.

“Oh!” said Shawn, flopping his whole body around and then dropping to the floor and spasming. “I’m sensing--a trip cut short--who lives in a pineapple under the sea? Something something...drop on the deck and…”

“Flop like a fish!” said Gus. Good man, Gus.

“A fishing trip!” said Shawn. “Except--you came back early.” All right, so that part he could have figured out from Jules’ comment, but neither detective had seen him at all last week, not even the one day he’d dropped in to pick up a check and had that talk with Buzz, so they wouldn’t know how he’d figured out the rest. “What gives, Lassie? Is it--a case? Something unsolvable--well, so far unsolvable, because you haven’t yet called in your favorite crime-solving duo…”

“ _No_ ,” said Lassie again, who was proving to be a man of few words this morning. “We don’t need you.”

Shawn appealed to Jules with his best puppy-dog eyes, which had been known to work on straight men, so he thought he’d have a chance even though they’d already broken up, but she shook her head apologetically. “Sorry, Shawn,” she said. “Nothing new since last week, actually. We’re mostly catching up on paperwork.”

“In that case, Shawn,” said Gus, “I really need to get to my rounds. I’ve got two possible new clients I want to hit up, and if we aren’t earning money here--”

“Gus, don’t be--” said Shawn, but he was kept from having to figure out which epithet to use by Chief Vick’s office door opening.

“Gentlemen,” she said, which was all very well when it came to Gus, but Shawn was not a gentleman. He supposed she meant it nicely. “Don’t go just yet. We’ve got a body, and I’d rather have as many people as we can on it right away.”

“Aye aye, captain,” said Shawn, saluting. She gave him a look. “Sorry, must have been left over from channeling SpongeBob.”

“SpongeBob is a fictional character,” hissed Gus, probably trying to be discreet, and audible to everyone around them.

“You know the spirits don’t discriminate,” said Shawn, shrugging. “Anyway, where’s the body, Chief? What’s the gist? What do we need to know?”

“It isn’t pretty,” the Chief sighed, coming over and putting a file on Jules’ desk.

“It’s a dead body,” said Gus. “They’re never _attractive_.”

“Not the body itself,” said the Chief. “The whole thing. Forty-something year old man, in Shoreline Park. It looks like he might have been assaulted.” She looked at their expressions and probably guessed what kinds of things Shawn was going to say next, because she added quickly, “ _Sexually_ assaulted. Raped.”

Jules and Gus both gasped a little, which made sense, because they were kind, sensitive souls, even Jules, who was kind, sensitive, and badass. Shawn was pretty sure that he was the only one who heard the noise that came from Lassie, which sounded less like a gasp and more like he was choking on air. But when Shawn glanced over, Lassie was scowling as usual, this time coming over to direct the scowl at the open case file on his partner’s desk. Shawn filed the noise away for future reference.


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> CW: I'm not sure if this merits a content warning but there is a dead body in this chapter. This is a case fic, so the body continues to be present in pretty much all future chapters, I am not planning to warn specifically about it again.

Carlton didn’t want to leave the station. He realized this on his third bathroom trip in under ten minutes; after the first one, he’d taken to just going into one of the stalls, locking the door, and then standing there and resting his head against it gently. In the station he was surrounded by--if not friends, at least co-workers, and, more importantly, those co-workers were cops, and almost all armed. He was armed, too, now, but somehow that wasn’t enough.

The door to the bathroom opened and shut, and Carlton sucked in a quiet breath, and then flushed the toilet and left the stall so that whoever had come in wouldn’t be suspicious about how long he was taking. It turned out to be McNab, and he finished his business quickly enough to come stand next to Carlton at the sinks to wash his own hands.

“Oh, geez,” said McNab, sounding shocked, and Carlton looked up from his hands to see what had happened to find McNab looking back at him. Or, more specifically, at his face. “That eye looks pretty nasty, Detective Lassiter.”

Carlton scowled instinctively and glanced at himself in the mirror, catching his first glimpse of his own face in at least eight hours. “It’s fine,” he said, although he was startled by how not-fine it looked. He hadn’t even realized he had a black eye until Guster had pointed it out.

“Did you get that fishing?” asked McNab as he went to the paper towel dispenser.

“No,” said Carlton. “I mean, yes. I, uh, slipped. On the boat.”

“Slippery things, boats,” said McNab, nodding sagely. “When they get wet and all.”

“Right,” said Carlton. “I have to go. I have, uh, there’s a crime scene.” It wasn’t until he left the bathroom that he realized he hadn’t dried his hands; he scowled at some invisible point mid-air, for lack of anyone or thing to direct it at, and wiped them on the parts of his shirt covered by his jacket.

***

Shawn was antsy. He and Gus had left the station as soon as possible once they and the police detectives had all gone over the file, and they’d been standing outside the crime scene tape for almost fifteen minutes now waiting for Lassie and Jules to arrive. Not that they couldn’t have just stepped over it; in fact, since the Chief had already hired them for this case, they would be way more justified in bursting onto this crime scene than they normally were. But Gus wasn’t too eager to get up close and personal with the dead guy yet, and much as Shawn wanted to get the investigatorial jump on Lassie, he also wanted to know where the heck the detectives were.

“Gus,” he said, hopping gently from foot to foot, “is ‘investigatorial’ a word?”

“I’m not actually sure,” said Gus. “Look, Shawn, why don’t _you_ just go check out the scene, and then we can go?”

“Nah,” said Shawn, “I might need you to help with a vision. And visions are always better with an audience--where _are_...oh, good.”

Lassie and Jules had just come into view, coming from a different direction than where Gus had needed to park the Blueberry--but actual police cars probably got better parking deals. Lassie’s sunglasses were back in place, but it was bright out, so Jules was wearing hers, too, and both looked suitably cool and badass. Unless that was redundant. “Do cool and badass mean the same thing?”

“No, Shawn,” said Gus, “and can we _focus_ , and then maybe get out of here? Or at least a little farther from the eau de dead guy.”

“Gus, we haven’t even seen the oaty dead guy yet,” said Shawn. “Come on, buddy, cover your wide and magnificent nose with your shirt or something and let’s check him out.”

“Oh, _now_ you want to go ahead of them?” said Gus, gesturing at Lassie and Jules who were still a few steps away, but Shawn ignored him and stepped over the tape, spinning around a few times just to look kooky and get a good view of the surroundings before sauntering closer to Mr. Dead Guy. He knew Gus would follow, anyway.

“Remind you of anyone?” he asked a few seconds later when Gus caught up, nose wrinkled but uncovered, and stood next to him to survey the body. The man’s pants were up but not fastened, and he didn’t seem to have any underwear on, a fact that made Gus’s nose wrinkle a little more when he noticed. Shawn catalogued faint red marks on either side of the bridge of Mr. Dead Guy’s nose, bruises on his wrists, something on an exposed part of his forearm that looked like a needle mark, and an expensive watch that was starting to come unfastened but still hanging on. He also noticed that the man was tall, fairly thin, and had a full head of dark hair.

“We’ve seen a lot of dead bodies, Shawn,” said Gus, taking deep breaths through his mouth. “They kind of look the same after a while.”

“Oh!” said Jules as she and Lassie came up next to them. She glanced at her partner, and then bit back whatever else she’d been going to say.

“I wasn’t thinking of anyone dead,” Shawn muttered, for Gus’s ears alone. Gus looked at the body again, a sideways glance so he wouldn’t need to see it in too much detail, and then shifted his focus.

“Oh, man,” he said. “Detective Lassiter, this guy kind of looks like you.”

Lassie’s mouth was set, but not in the normal sort of annoyed Lassie way. It looked to Shawn almost as though he was trying not to hurl.

***

By the time he’d finally started driving away from the station, Carlton had already been on a sort of half-auto-pilot. He’d been doing his job for over twelve years; he knew how to do it even when he wasn’t feeling fully up to it. He’d done his job with the flu before, for Justice’s sake. This was just another crime scene.

When he saw the body and O’Hara’s glance at him, and heard Guster’s uncalled for observation, his options seemed to be to lose it, or to go further into some kind of automatic mode of operating. Which wasn’t really a choice at all. “Shut up,” he said, and went to get gloves and talk to the first responders. Really, aside from superficial similarities--dark hair, tall, similar age--the man didn’t look anything like him.

“It looks like he was getting a black eye,” said O’Hara, crouched next to him and wearing her own gloves. Carlton glanced at her, then away.

A few minutes later, the gloves were discarded and their John Doe--his wallet and therefore ID was missing--was being loaded into a body bag, for Woody to work his magic on. Woody working magic brought images to Carlton’s mind that he didn’t particularly like, so he adjusted his thinking. Woody would be _doing his job_ on the body. So far, there wasn’t any sign of what, exactly, had killed the man.

“Woah,” said Spencer, reeling suddenly and putting his hand to his head. “I’m sensing--condoms, shampoo packets, pictures of children--”

O’Hara made a face. “What on earth, Shawn?”

“Uh--pictures of kids?” said Guster, obviously not quite following his other half for once. “Shawn…”

“Money, ego--ego? Id? ID!” said Spencer.

“Wallet!” said Guster. “That’s all things you keep in a wallet! Although I think you’re the only one who keeps shampoo in your wallet, Shawn.”

“The spirits say otherwise,” said Spencer, with his eyes still closed.

“His wallet _was_ missing,” said O’Hara. “And his phone, although I guess he could have left his phone behind somewhere.”

“ID!” said Spencer again. “The spirits are saying this wasn’t a robbery. The killer took his ID so that we wouldn’t know right away who this guy was. They’re saying, uh, look...see...watch! His watch!”

“That _was_ an expensive watch he had on,” said O’Hara. “A robber would probably have taken it, too. Wow, Shawn!”

“He didn’t mean to kill him,” said Carlton suddenly. All three of them looked at him, with disconcertingly similar expressions that mixed surprise and a bit of concern. He frowned from behind the barrier of his sunglasses. “I mean, I think. He took him to, uh, assault, but he didn’t mean--it must have been drugs. Or something, to keep him quiet. But he messed up and gave him too much.”

“What makes you say…” O’Hara started, looking too calculating for Carlton’s peace of mind.

“Oh, Lassie!” cried Spencer. “It’s a miracle!” He launched himself across the space between them; Carlton flinched with his whole body and took a step back. He couldn’t help it. To his surprise, Spencer pulled up short about a foot away, and then reached out relatively slowly to caress his face. It was still an invasion of personal space, but it wasn’t what Carlton had expected. Neither was what Spencer said next. “Could it be? Jules--Lassie’s had a revealing nation! He’s become psychic, too!”

Guster said, “You mean a revelation?” Carlton said nothing. He wasn’t sure what to say.


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> No content warnings other than those that apply to the whole fic.
> 
> Also, Shoreline Park actually exists, but you can safely assume that all my knowledge of Santa Barbara geography comes from google and my imagination, so don't plan any trips based on this story.
> 
> EDITED on 6/22/20 to change a single line that will hopefully make the whole crime-solving part of this hang together just a tiny bit better.

“I’ve heard it both ways,” said Spencer.

“Carlton?” said O’Hara.

Carlton realized that he’d been standing stock still, with Spencer’s hand still cradling his cheek, for at least three times as long as he’d normally have allowed it. He smacked Spencer’s hand down, trying to think.

He had, from what he could tell, three choices. He could explain honestly where the theory had come from. Except--he tried thinking back far enough, and his brain kind of slid away again, like it had earlier that morning. So putting words to it would be hard, even if he’d wanted to. He could pretend that he’d put it together from some sort of clue that O’Hara had missed, or misinterpreted. Except that he definitely wasn’t firing on all cylinders, and wasn’t sure what that explanation would sound like. Or he could go along with Spencer’s charade. Three days ago, this would have been his absolute last choice.

“That must be it,” he said.

“ _What?_ ” said Guster. “That’s not poss-- I mean, Shawn’s the only--”

Spencer looked a little shocked, but he recovered incredibly quickly. “I knew it,” he said. “I could feel the spirits reacting.”

O’Hara was looking at him differently, which he _didn’t want_ , but at least it wasn’t the way she’d be looking at him if she knew the truth. “Wow, Carlton,” she said slowly, “and you never even believed _Shawn_ was psychic.”

“It’s obviously come as a shock to him,” said Shawn pompously, “which is why I should ride back to the station with him, to provide psychic coaching, and maybe you, Gus, should take Jules…”

“Actually, Shawn,” said Guster, grabbing his friend’s arm, “you and I have a _very important conversation_ that we need to go have, remember? And we need to have it _as soon as possible_ , remember? So we’re going to my car _now_.”

“Right,” said Spencer, not put off in the least. “Don’t worry, Lassinator!” he added loudly as Guster dragged him backwards away from the crime scene. “I’ll give you some psychic coaching as soon as we get a chance!”

Several officers stopped what they were doing to look from Spencer to Carlton and back again. “Do your jobs,” snarled Carlton, and turned to stride back towards his own car. O’Hara caught him up quickly and gave him a look. It was one of her looks that combined compassion with sheer detective ability, which usually made him proud, but not at this moment. “I don’t want to talk about it,” he said.

“I think we have to,” said O’Hara, to his surprise. “But we don’t have to yet.”

***

“You are certifiably _insane_ ,” said Gus. “I shouldn’t even be driving us back to the station. I should be driving us _out of the country_ because you just told _Lassiter_ that he is _psychic_ and now he knows it’s all fake!”

“Gus, don’t be typing the letter S on a flip phone,” said Shawn. “How do you know he isn’t actually psychic?”

“Because _you_ aren’t psychic, Shawn, because psychics _aren’t real_!” said Gus.

“Even supposing that’s true,” said Shawn, ignoring Gus’s splutter that he _knew it was true_ , “Lassie isn’t going to give us away. You heard him--he already agreed with me.”

“Just because he’s gone temporarily insane doesn’t mean that he won’t come back to his senses in the next twenty minutes,” said Gus. “Though he has been a little weird today.”

“Yeah,” said Shawn, and then had a strange, unexpected morality crisis. He’d been about to say, “Gus, think about it, why do you think Lassie said what he said? And do you really think whether or not psychics are real is the biggest thing on his mind right now?” but Lassie was obviously trying to hide, well, something, and even if it was the something that Shawn thought it was, wasn’t it really Lassie’s choice whether people knew or not? And where had this sudden sympathy even come from? “I’m surprised at you Gus,” he said instead. “I thought you were going to jump at the chance to give Jules a ride.”

Honestly, any innuendo had been entirely accidental, but Shawn could tell that if Gus had lighter skin he would be blushing. “ _Shawn_! That is entirely unprofessional--why you would think--”

“Dude, you’re normally so smooth!” said Shawn. “Is this because we work with her? Or because I dated her first? Believe me when I say that Jules is a lovely lady and I have absolutely no claim on her.”

“You can’t _claim_ a woman, Shawn,” said Gus, sounding calmer. “Especially not one like Juliet.” Shawn sat back and let him lecture all the way to the station.

***

Carlton stood at the counter and watched the coffee machine dripping. He was trying to remember anything useful, but his brain kept doing that annoying slidey thing and distracting him. Despite his newly found “psychic powers,” and his assertion that the death had been sort of accidental, they hadn’t made it much farther on the Shoreline Park John Doe case in the past few hours.

Spencer and Guster had tagged along when Carlton and his partner had gone to visit Woody, although Guster had excused himself fairly quickly. It probably had something to do with the small electric griddle that Woody had plugged in off to the side, where he was cooking two burgers, the smell of which had not mixed at all well with formaldehyde. Carlton and O’Hara had managed to convince him that there were better areas in the building to be cooking lunch.

Woody’s first choice for COD was suffocation, or something like it. He’d started to describe the other, more intimate injuries the man had received, but Spencer had interrupted him with a--frankly, well-timed--vision, which had led him to careen around the room and end up exposing the inside of the corpse’s elbow, which had a faint needle mark. Woody had said that he’d already removed tissues for drug testing, and he’d make sure they tested for anything that would have been injected. “Test for roofies, too,” said Carlton. They all looked at him. “Whatever the normal date-rape drugs to test for are,” he said. “Even if they’re not injected.”.

“Oh, Woody, did you know Lassie’s a psychic too?” said Spencer, doing something complicated that ended with his hand on Carlton’s head, but again without any further invasion of space. It was almost reserved, for Spencer. “It came on him suddenly. The spirits are much kinder to him, though, his visions are gentler than mine.”

“Well, congrats,” said Woody. “Sure you don’t want a burger?”

Despite Spencer’s promise to provide psychic coaching, he and Guster had disappeared not long after that, claiming starvation. Carlton and O’Hara had gone back towards Shoreline Park, to interview the staff arriving for the afternoon, and then come back to comb through missing persons cases on the off chance that their John Doe was one of them. Actually, O’Hara had left at some point, possibly to eat as well, but Carlton had been absorbed in the files. And now he was getting coffee.

“Carlton?” said his partner, appearing in front of him and blocking his view of the now full coffee pot. “Are you OK? You’ve been standing here for at least five minutes.”

“Fine,” he said. “I just need caffeine.”

“When’s the last time you ate?” she asked, hovering as he added cream and sugar to his mug. “Because it’s almost three and I never saw you get lunch.”

With this specific of a question, Carlton found he could focus on his memories a little better. When _had_ he last ate? Friday evening, he knew he’d gotten something at the bar. What, exactly, was beyond him, but at least it had been food. Then came Friday night, Saturday, Saturday night...he knew there hadn’t been food then. Sunday, when he’d thought it was Monday, he’d woken up in his yard and gone into his house. He’d showered. He’d drunk water, knowing he was dehydrated. He’d eaten some cereal, he remembered now, because he’d also known that he needed the calories and that was the easiest thing for him to find. Then he’d driven to the SBPD and slept in his car. Now it was Monday, so, “Yesterday,” he said truthfully, and then wished he’d thought to lie.

“Oh, _Carlton_ ,” said O’Hara. “No wonder you look out of it. Come on, I’ll buy you something.”

She took hold of his sleeve gently as she started walking towards the door, but Carlton stood stock still and yanked his arm back, sending coffee sloshing over the sides of his mug and to the floor. Luckily it mostly missed his hand. “No it’s--I’m not hungry. I think--Woody’s burgers. You know.”

O’Hara’s always open expression went from shocked to sympathetic. “Oh, I know. That was pretty gross. But you have to eat _something_.”

“We don’t have to go anywhere,” said Carlton, and hoped he didn’t sound pleading. “I’ll buy some vending machine pretzels.”

He could see the moment O’Hara relented. “All right,” she said, “but you just go to your desk and drink your coffee. I’ll buy you the pretzels. And you have to actually eat them.”


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks to everyone kudos-ing, commenting, and/or just reading! I am still relatively new to posting things so even watching the hits count go up is still exciting for me.

Shawn woke up significantly earlier than he usually did, memories and theories jangling around in his head. Every case was important to him for some reason, whether that reason was getting justice or getting one up on the SBPD, but for some reason this one was sticking with him more than most. Probably, he admitted to himself as he stood in front of his mirror doing his hair, because of his suspicions about Lassie’s apparent insider information. He probably should have spent longer talking to Lassie on Monday, but despite everything he’d said to Gus, he had eventually gotten a little bit worried about the possible consequences of him claiming Lassie to be psychic. Besides, they’d been following leads.

Not that following leads had done them much good. Armed with Gus’s expert knowledge on drugs and what had been discussed in the autopsy room, Shawn and Gus had gone to various suppliers to try to figure out if they could track down someone by their drug purchases, but this turned out to be a bigger task than Shawn had expected. There were a surprising number of sketchy drugs that weren’t totally illegal; GHB, ketamine, and whole lists of what Gus called barbiturates. There were also way too many legitimate reasons for people to have access to those drugs, especially anesthesiologists. Gus, to be fair, had said as much before they started, but Shawn had figured his memory would help them out. It hadn’t, or not enough.

By shortly after 9am, he was pulling up to the Psych office. Gus looked up from his laptop in some confusion. “You OK?” he said. “You’re never in this early unless you spend the night here.”

“Let’s go to the station,” said Shawn, throwing his helmet onto the couch. “Maybe they’ve got new info since yesterday. Woody might have got the tox screen results back.”

“Those usually take a couple weeks,” said Gus, but he closed his laptop obligingly, and grabbed his sample case. “I have to do rounds this afternoon, but I guess we could check in this morning…”

“We could bring Jules a smoothie!” said Shawn. “And I guess Lassie, too. Because obviously we have to stop for smoothies first.”

“You know that’s right,” said Gus.

By the time Gus parked in front of the SBPD, Shawn had pretty much recovered from his brain freeze. “I told you I could finish it by the time we got here!” 

“I never said you couldn’t,” said Gus, “now give me mine, don’t you dare drink it too!”

“You can even deliver Jules’s,” said Shawn, “and I’ll bring Lassie his.” On his way in, Shawn eyed the parking lot, noting the position of Lassie’s Crown Vic, and compared it to his mental picture of the lot yesterday afternoon, when they’d left. Hmm. Not that Lassie didn’t park in his spot every day, but he didn’t park at the _exact same angle_ every day, as far as Shawn knew. In fact, getting the angle as similar as it currently was from one day to the next would be pretty damn impressive.

***

Carlton heard Spencer and Guster before he saw them, which was usually the way of things. This time instead of arguing over some obscure 80s reference, though, Spencer was already calling his name. Well, his nickname. “Lassie!”

Carlton looked up, trying to arrange his face into the appropriate dismissive grimace, and then blinking instead when a pale pink smoothie was thrust under his nose. “Spencer, what--”

“It’s yours,” said Spencer, “I went with strawberry-banana, I hope that’s OK. I already drank mine in the car, Gus bet me I wouldn’t finish it before we got here.”

“I did not,” said Guster, sounding as though he’d already had this argument. He was standing next to O’Hara’s desk, both of them holding their own plastic cups. “He did finish it, though.”

Carlton took the smoothie, mostly to get it out of his face, and eyed it suspiciously. “I watched him make it,” said Spencer quietly, “and it hasn’t been out of my sight since.” This sounded, strangely, more reassuring than teasing, and Carlton shot him a look as he took his first sip.

“Did you sleep here?” Spencer asked, at about the same volume, and Carlton almost choked on the smoothie.

“No, why would you even--” he tried, looking over and seeing that O’Hara and Guster were thankfully entirely distracted by their own conversation. “I don’t--I’m not even wearing the same thing.”

“You’re wearing the same suit, and the shirt and tie that you keep in your bottom desk drawer for emergencies,” said Spencer. “Also your car hasn’t moved at _all_ , so unless Jules gave you a ride…” He trailed off as he seemed to recognize that Carlton wasn’t going to answer. “Listen, Lassie,” he said, “I’m not gonna pry, but if you need anything, you know we’re on your side, right?”

“Shawn,” said O’Hara, “we were just about to update the Chief on what we’ve got, do you want to come?”

Spencer bounced up off of the corner of Carlton’s desk, and when had he even sat down, anyway? “Sure thing, Jules,” he said. “The spirits are saying we need to put our heads together on this one.”

It wasn’t until Carlton was following him to the conference room that he realized Spencer hadn’t even pretended to have a vision about him spending the night at the station. He also realized that he was going to need to go home soon for another clean shirt.

***

There was frustratingly little new information. Shawn leaned back in his chair and then let the front legs thump back to the ground, ignoring the frowns of everyone else in the conference room as he thought. They could be pretty sure that the body had been dumped, not killed right there; there had even been a bit of an indication of where people might have walked to the dump spot, but the park wasn’t unpopular, so even though it wasn’t right on the path, other people could have walked through the same area, too. Which was the only odd part about the whole thing; Shoreline Park had a rocky beach that was often covered by the tide. It seemed to Shawn like that would have been a much better area to drop a body than up on the bluff itself, where someone was bound to stumble across it eventually. But he didn’t know _why_ yet, and so couldn’t have a vision about it.

Shawn heard the words “anal contusions,” which were not the ones he would have chosen to zone back in to, and realized Juliet was describing the autopsy results. She looked a little upset, but mostly businesslike. He glanced at the others in the conference room: Chief Vick looked focused and sad; Gus looked like he might throw up, but also like he wanted to hear; Lassie looked even paler than normal.

“And we asked Woody to test for date-rape drugs,” said Jules, glancing at Lassie. “Detective Lassiter suggested it.”

“Just a hunch,” said Lassie, who’d been letting Jules lead the debriefing. Shawn noted with interest that neither he nor Jules had yet suggested to the Chief that Lassie was psychic. This was probably for the best. Unfortunately, Shawn probably needed to pull Lassie aside pretty soon for “psychic coaching” anyway, because he suspected that whatever memories Lassie had from last weekend, which Shawn was now 98% sure had not included a fishing trip, were their best bet to catch whoever had killed Mr. Dead Guy With Contusions.

“Well,” said the Chief, probably about to suggest someone tangential that they should interview, or for them to go keep reading through missing persons files, or just to say that they were doing their best, but Shawn never found out which because before she could, Buzz knocked awkwardly on the open conference room door.

“Sorry to interrupt, Chief, detectives,” said Buzz. He hesitated, and then added, “Shawn. Gus.”

“What _is_ it, McNab?” barked Lassie.

“Call just came in; they found another body at Shoreline Park,” said Buzz, and glanced down at the memo paper he was holding. Shawn looked at it too, and read most of what it said, meaning he was the only one unsurprised when Buzz went on, “Early middle aged man, on the beach. Probably dumped from the bluff. And, uh, it’s looking like he was sexually assaulted.”

Jules didn’t gasp this time, though Gus did. All of them stared at Buzz for a few beats after he finished reading, except for Shawn, who looked at Lassie. Lassie looked like he was going to pass out.


	5. Chapter 5

Carlton gave O’Hara the keys, and an extra-ferocious scowl so that she wouldn’t ask questions. He wanted to keep doing everything as normally as possible, but he also knew that if he drove there was a good chance he would zone out or, Justice forbid, pass out and crash them both. The vending machine pretzels last night and the smoothie, which he’d finished absentmindedly before the meeting had really started, were all he’d eaten in the past two days, a fact that he didn’t intend to let O’Hara find out.

The low blood sugar wasn’t his main problem, though. He stared through his sunglasses and out the window without actually seeing any of their surroundings. If this body was from the same killer as the last one, and if that killer was the same person Carlton thought it was, then maybe the last one hadn’t been a mistake after all. Maybe _he’d_ been the mistake. Which didn’t explain why he’d woken up alone on his lawn Sunday night.

“Carlton?” said O’Hara, tentatively. “Is something going on in your personal life or something? I mean, besides being, um, psychic now. Because you’ve seemed a little out of it ever since your fishing trip.”

Carlton pushed down a surge of guilt for lying to his partner about any number of things, and then turned towards her, saw the look in her eyes, and wondered exactly how many of his lies she was buying. “I’m fine,” he said, for what felt like the fortieth time in two days. “Just getting back into the swing of things.”

“Um-hm,” said O’Hara, a noise that suggested both agreement and a little disbelief. “Oh look, there’s Gus. And Shawn.”

Carlton’s observation skills and reactions were nowhere close to normal, but after a moment he realized that O’Hara had pointed out Guster before his sidekick, for the first time in--ever, he thought. That was an interesting change.

***

Shawn hadn’t quite realized that when Buzz said “dumped from the bluff” he had actually meant it. The new body, which was also that of a tallish, thinnish man with dark hair, though not quite Lassie’s height, seemed to have rolled and skidded down the rocks and brush above before coming to a stop on the beach, and it had the damage to match. Gus whimpered.

They’d arrived before the SBPD detectives again, although only by a matter of minutes this time. Shawn circled the body, ignoring the officers securing the scene, and then stood up, yelled, “Oh my God, it’s a whale!” and pointed towards the ocean.

Gus, bless him, kept it up by going “Not there, over there!” several times over, giving Shawn enough time to grab a piece of driftwood and shift the dead guy’s shirt to reveal a tattoo that had been just visible over his ribs. By the time the officers had given up on finding the whale and were looking again, the shirt was back in place--a relative term, it was all torn up anyway--the driftwood was on the ground, and Shawn was standing back with his hands in his pockets.

He smiled and said, “Didn’t see it? Oh, well, zesty lavatory,” and wandered over to Gus.

“C’est la vie?” suggested Gus, after a moment where he just seemed to be mouthy _zesty lavatory_ to himself. “It’s French.”

“I’ve heard it both ways,” said Shawn, and then dropped his voice. “Hey, buddy, can you look up these coordinates? He has a tattoo that said...”

Gus typed the coordinates into his phone as Shawn wandered away again and back towards the body, where Jules and Lassie had now arrived and were going through his pockets with gloves on. Shawn had already noticed that, like with the last body, the pants were up but not fastened or really hiding anything, and he also noticed that Lassie was letting Jules do most of the rummaging. “No wallet again,” Jules was saying. “No phone--oh, there is this.” She pulled out a slip of paper. Shawn read it as she held it up for Lassie to see. “A shopping list? I don’t even know what some of this is.”

Gus came up to Shawn and tugged him a few steps away. “It’s the southern part of the Santa Barbara Zoo,” he hissed.

“What’s mur-taze-a-pine?” hissed Shawn back.

“Um, Mirtazapine is an antidepressant,” said Gus. “Oh, but I just read this in a paper, I think you can treat cats with it, too, for something--anxiety, or weight loss.”

“You’re the best, buddy,” said Shawn, took two steps away, and started growling like a lion.

He thought it was like a lion, anyway; it took slightly more prancing around on hands and knees than he’d have liked, all while roaring and pretending to lick himself, before Jules said “He’s channelling a tiger?” which he decided was close enough.

“Yes!” said Shawn. He jumped up, hooked his elbow in Gus’s, and started to skip around singing, “Lions and tigers and bears, oh my! We’re off to see--not the wizard--what do you call that place with animals behind bars? Oh, or you can see them through plexiglass--”

“Prison?” said Lassie. Everyone within earshot stopped and looked at him. “What?”

“I think Shawn’s seeing a zoo,” said Gus, extracting his arm.

“He’s a keeper, baby!” said Shawn, waving his arms. “A zookeeper! I’m sensing _big_ cats and _little_...bottles of medicine.”

“This guy’s a zookeeper?” said Jules. “At the Santa Barbara Zoo?”

“That’s what the tigers are telling me,” said Shawn, calming down a little.

“Carlton,” said Jules, switching focus, “are _you_ getting anything? Psychically?”

Shawn tried not to grimace outwardly. He had no advice to give. Either Lassie knew something, or he didn’t.

“I think,” said Lassie slowly, “that we should do the same drug tests as on the last body. And, uh, if he _does_ work for the zoo,” he added, “we can ask his friends if he, uh, goes to any bars. Went. To any bars. Regularly.”

“He’s a natural!” crowed Shawn, pulling everyone’s attention back to himself. Gus frowned at him disapprovingly, but Shawn saw the slight look of relief on Lassie’s face, and wasn’t sorry.

***

O’Hara drove again when they went to the zoo. She didn’t ask questions, even about the “psychic” revelations that Carlton had just made. He wasn’t sure whether to be glad that she wasn’t asking any, or worried that she was saving them all up for later.

The first person they were brought to was one of several directors of different zoo things, and Carlton couldn’t remember her exact title a minute after she gave it. O’Hara, luckily, was taking notes. “Chances are I don’t know him--I don’t know all of our employees,” said the director of something, “but if you have good reason to think he worked with the big cats, I’ll bring you over there and I’m sure we can find someone who does.”

The first zoo-staff-shirt-clad person at the African Cats exhibit who they approached was a kind of dweeby-looking young man who gulped and said, “Sure, I’ll take a look at the photos.” He led them back to what seemed to be a staff break room, took one look at the corpse’s face--O’Hara had done her best to find a photo that wasn’t too graphic--and said, “Oh, God, that’s Todd.” Then he started crying.

Carlton went out and found another staff-shirt-wearing person and brought her back to the break room too. She was a good deal tougher than the dweeby guy, and also recognized the man in the picture. “Todd Dougherty,” she said, patting her co-worker on the back awkwardly. “He’s worked here for years, since before either of us got here. He’s a veterinarian--sorry, _was_. God, that’s weird.”

“Do you know anything about what he did when he wasn’t here?” said O’Hara. “Any, um, friends he hung with, or any places he would go to regularly?”

“No,” said the woman, “we didn’t know him super well. It’s just a shock because he was always _around_ , you know, like he almost lived here. But he didn’t actually live here--he went home at night and stuff. His family would know more. He has-- _had_ \--a wife. And a two-year old daughter.”

“Oh,” said Carlton involuntarily. He and O’Hara looked at each other. This wasn’t going to be fun.

***

“I told you I have to go on my rounds,” said Gus. “I said that this morning. And don’t try to tell me you forgot, Shawn.”

“I didn’t forget,” said Shawn, “I just didn’t think about it. Will you at least drop me off by the office? I need my bike.”

Gus seemed a little surprised that Shawn didn't put up more of a fight for Gus to come with him on his investigations. Shawn wondered with the back of his mind if his friend scheduled himself with extra time for his drug-pushing routes, just in case of Shawn’s interference. That seemed like the kind of well-adjusted thing that Gus would do.

Shawn was pretty content with _not_ having Gus with him, for once. Obviously this wasn’t a regular thing, but they were like chocolate and vanilla, peanut butter and jelly, pineapple and pizza: things that were best together, but could be enjoyed separately on occasion. Also, though Gus obviously knew that Lassie wasn’t psychic, he didn’t seem to have picked up on why Shawn had claimed he was in the first place, and Shawn didn’t feel like trying to come up with an explanation for Gus about why they were going to Tom Blair’s Pub that didn’t include the sentences, “Lassie goes there; something happened to Lassie; something similar happened to these guys; Lassie said we should be looking into bars.” Better to just go, and fill Gus in later on.

Shawn hadn’t really considered that bars aren’t likely to be highly populated, or even necessarily open, in the middle of the afternoon, but luckily, Gus and Shawn had gotten lunch before parting ways, and Tom Blair’s had opened at 2, though there weren’t many people inside.

“Hi,” said Shawn, making his way up to the bar itself in his leather jacket. “Shawn Spencer, psychic detective. Do any of you work on Friday nights?”

Luck continued to be on his side; the woman cleaning glasses like a saloon owner in a wild west movie didn’t work on Fridays, but she called for a guy who was back in another room. He introduced himself as Skip, and said he worked most weekends and the occasional weekly shift, like this one. “Were you here last Friday evening?” said Shawn, and Skip said yes. “Did you see this man?” said Shawn, and pulled out a photo from his inside jacket pocket.

 _Sorry, Lassie_ , Shawn thought as Skip picked up the photo--a copy from Lassie’s personnel file that Shawn had grabbed at the same time as he’d made copies of the relevant crime scene photos before lunch. He hadn’t even needed to ask Gus for a distraction, just run to the “bathroom” while all the others were in the conference room again, comparing crime scenes. “Oh yeah, he’s in here kinda regular,” said Skip. “He usually gets a table.”

“Did he on Friday?” said Shawn.

“I dunno,” said Skip, and considered for a little while. “I think he sat at the bar.”

“OK,” said Shawn, “now for the million dollar question: did you see what happened to him?”

“Is he, like, dead or something?” said Skip, and Shawn said “No!” so quickly that it startled both of them.

“No,” said Shawn again, “he’s fine, I just want to know what happened between Friday night and now.” He realized as he said it that he often came up with much better stories to get information out of people he didn’t know, and that he had never minded it in the past even when he was doing it to get information about friends, like Gus or his dad, and especially not when he was getting dirt on Lassie. He also realized that he felt guilty anyway. He decided to stop thinking too deeply about it.

“I really dunno,” said Skip, who looked like he was trying to think, and also like it was hurting him a little. “Um, he got food, and some drinks.”

“Any idea what?” said Shawn, not sure if it would help, but willing to try.

“No,” said Skip, and then, surprisingly, was able to add, “I didn’t give him the food, I just remember he had a plate, right? But I did get him a scotch, I think. Or two. And then I gave him the one the other guy bought him.”

“Hold it right there,” said Shawn. “What other guy?”

Skip’s suddenly apparent powers of observation failed him just as suddenly. It was just “some guy,” who’d sat near Lassie at the bar. He was white, apparently, and had brownish hair, and that was it. He wasn’t tall or short, said Skip, and he wasn’t fat or skinny and he didn’t have any tattoos or piercings or anything else memorable about him.

“Is he in here a lot?” said Shawn, and Skip said that he’d never seen him before or after that Friday night.

The woman wiping glasses was named Deanna, and had worked on both Sunday and Monday evenings, and was willing to look at tasteful pictures of corpses to see if she recognized them, but there Shawn’s luck dried up again. “Sorry,” Deanna said, picking up the glass and bar rag that she’d put down to look at the photos. “I can’t promise anything, but I’m pretty sure they weren’t in here.”

“Narrows things down,” said Shawn cheerfully to her, and went out to his motorcycle, kick-started it, and suppressed the urge to drive away into the sunset.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A note at the end? That's different! I didn't want to spoil any of Shawn's psychic revelations but I did want to say, once again, that I don't live even remotely near Santa Barbara, so though the Santa Barbara Zoo does exist, that's probably the only true thing about it in this fic. Similarly, my knowledge of drugs (human and feline) is also through Google, meaning that my search history is pretty weird right now.


	6. Chapter 6

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> CW: Carlton is traumatized and not responding too well. (Basically, neither Carlton nor Shawn uses terms like “panic attack” or “PTSD” to describe any of what’s going on, but there’s probably a little bit of both of those at points.)
> 
> Probably a good time to add that although I have had friends go through various traumatic experiences, including sexual assault, I have never personally experienced anything like the stuff I’ve made up in this story. It is just a story. Everyone responds to trauma differently, and if you experience a similar assault, please consider professional help, like a therapist.

“Go home, Carlton,” said O’Hara, at around 7pm, “you look exhausted,” and he had to admit he probably did.

“All right,” he said, to her apparent surprise, and added, truthfully, “I could use a shower.” Then he drove home, and sat in his car at the curb for at least fifteen minutes.

Eventually, waiting in the car felt less safe than being inside the house, and Carlton took a deep breath, got out, locked the car, and tried to walk nonchalantly across his yard. By the time he reached his front door, his hands were shaking almost too hard to turn the key, and he was surprised, when he got inside, to find that he was wearing a suit, and not a poorly buttoned shirt and an open pair of pants over bare skin, like the last time he’d made it through the same door.

Like that last time, Carlton moved on auto-pilot to the shower, although this time he managed to get his suit hanging in his room so that it wouldn’t get wet on the bathroom floor. His shirt and pants from Sunday were still stuffed into the too-small bathroom trash can, he saw when he went in, and he turned on the water, got in, and pulled the shower curtain across quickly to block his view.

The shower worked in that he was cleaner when he finished than when he started, but it also didn’t work. The feeling of the water reminded him of the fleeting touches of seemingly disembodied hands on his oversensitized skin, and when he turned it off, the feeling got worse instead of better, even when he put clothes on--even when those clothes were another shirt and tie and suit, everything fastened and buttoned and closed off, with his shoulder holster on top.

_Water_ , he thought when he was dressed, and, _calories_ , and he went to his kitchen and drank water and ate handfuls of cereal from the box still sitting on his counter. Then he went back to his room, lay on top of his blankets fully clothed and still armed, and thought, _sleep_ , which didn’t come quite so easily.

Eventually his thoughts betrayed him further. He thought, _He took my phone. He gave me back my wallet and keys, but he had them. He knows my address. He dropped me off in my front yard at some odd hour of the night. He killed the others. What if he regrets leaving me alive? What if he just wants to have me again? What if he copied my key? What if he’s coming back?_

It was after midnight when Carlton got back up and collected his wallet and keys. He spent at least ten minutes watching his front yard from the corner of a dark window. Then he left his house, locked the door, got back in his car, and drove back to the station.

He’d spent the night in the Crown Vic again last night, to give some semblance of leaving and returning. But tonight, when he parked in his familiar spot and reclined the seat as far as it would go, he still didn’t feel safe. The station doors locked after a certain time, but they were never really locked to a police officer. Carlton scanned his ID and was inside before he even consciously thought about it. There were a few lights around the building; night shift and cleaning staff, mostly, no one had huge, work-late cases going on right now. The bullpen was mostly dark. He almost went to O’Hara’s desk, and then decided that there were levels of pitiful that even now he would not stoop to. Instead he went to his own, crouched down, and crawled underneath it. Knees up to his chin, surrounded by wood on three sides and the quiet noises of a nighttime police station, Carlton closed his eyes and did the closest thing to sleep he’d done since going to Tom Blair’s on Friday night.

***

When Shawn left Tom Blair’s on Tuesday, he drove to Shoreline Park, just so he could park, walk to the edge of the bluff, and feel the wind in his face until his eyes watered. Then he went back to his motorcycle and met Gus for dinner.

“You OK, Shawn?” asked Gus, near the end of the meal. This was, Shawn remembered, the second time that day that Gus had asked him this, which called for some top-level reassurance.

“Just OK?” he said. “I’m better than OK--I’m great, peachy, pineappley, even, why do you ask?”

“You didn’t finish your tacos,” said Gus, “I’ve never seen you do that before.”

“Oh, well,” said Shawn, and kind of mashed his last taco into his plate. “I’m not as young as I once was, my metabolism isn’t getting any faster, you know.”

Gus raised an eyebrow at him. “You’ve literally never worried about that before.”

“Yeah, OK,” said Shawn, deflating a little, “this case is definitely getting to me, like, a bit.”

“‘Cause of Lassie,” said Gus sagely. Shawn dropped the piece of smashed taco that he’d been holding and stared at him. “Oh, come on, Shawn, I’m not blind,” said Gus. “I can tell Lassie’s been kind of down about this case, and, well, you know how you were on me about Juliet.”

“Wait, what?” said Shawn. This was not the connection he’d expected Gus to eventually make.

“Just ‘cause I’m paying attention to Jules, you think my player instincts are dulled?” said Gus. “I’ve seen you with Lassie, man; talking with your heads together, buying him a smoothie.”

“That’s ridiculous,” said Shawn, “come on, I’ve been _less_ handsy with him than normal, even.”

“Exactly, you’re being, like, respectful and stuff,” said Gus, and gave him the sort of lowered-eyelids look he usually reserved for women he was hitting on. “Is it cause he’s a guy? You know I don’t mind, Shawn, we’ve talked about this before. It _is_ a little weird that it’s Lassiter, but…”

“No, that’s not--Gus this is crazy, I don’t--Lassie?” sputtered Shawn, and then realized he sounded just like Gus had when he, Shawn, had accused him of having a thing for Juliet. “I don’t know, man,” he said, more subdued. Maybe it was best for Gus to just think that, for now. “I just--give me a little time, you know? To, like, figure it out.”

“Yeah, Shawn,” said Gus, now looking a little worried. “But don’t forget you can talk to me, OK? Not, like, any details or anything, I don’t want to know your fantasies, but--”

Shawn threw a piece of his now totally destroyed taco at him, and felt a little better.

That night he couldn’t sleep. This happened sometimes anyways, but this night in particular there were new reasons for his insomnia. Gus’s words played in his head as he lay in bed, over a montage of his interactions with Lassie for the past couple days and, all right, he’d been less obnoxious to the guy lately, but that was because he was pretty sure he’d been through a traumatic experience in the past three or four days, right? It was the same way he’d react if _anyone_ he knew had been through that. If it was Gus, or Jules, or heck, even Buzz, he would still want to find their assailant and throw him to the ground, maybe smash his face a little; he would still want to reassure them, to hold their stupid, knuckly hands, and sort of wrap himself around their dumb, gangly bodies as a layer of protection between them and the world, and maybe kiss the tips of their ridiculous, oversized ears…

Crap.

He got up and played Mario Kart.

At precisely 7am, when he knew the electronic locks on the SBPD station doors automatically clicked open, Shawn changed his clothes, grabbed his helmet, and hopped on his motorcycle.

***

“Detective?” said someone, and Carlton sat up, hit his head on the underside of his desk, and grabbed awkwardly for his gun.

“Wow, you must have got in even earlier than I did!” continued McNab, who was crouched down where Carlton’s desk chair had been the night before, peering at him. “Is that your early morning nap spot?”

Carlton unstuck his tongue from the roof of his mouth and tried to think of a response, then groaned instead when a familiar pair of jean-clad legs appeared next to McNab, and a familiar hand fell onto McNab’s shoulder, and Shawn Spencer leaned down to look under the desk, too, saying, “Sorry, Buzz, it’s a psychic thing. I’m working with him. Lassie and I are gonna need at least a six foot Demeter around the desk free of other people to keep our auras clear, can you make sure of that?”

McNab’s honest face screwed up a little and his mouth moved soundlessly for a moment. “Do you mean diameter? And probably you mean radius, really, Shawn, because a six foot diameter wouldn’t be that big a circle.”

“What is this, algebra class?” said Spencer carelessly. “Help me out here, man.”

“Yeah, of course,” said McNab. “I’ll make sure no one gets too close. And--I think you mean geometry.”

“I’ve heard it both ways,” said Spencer, as McNab scrambled back to his feet and walked somewhere outside Carlton’s line of sight. “Good morning, Lassie,” he added. “Any room under there for another psychic?”

There was hardly enough room for one grown man, let alone two. Carlton moved anyway, sitting up as much as he could and shoving himself into a corner. He realized his right hand was still on the butt of his Glock and let go, wiping his sweaty palm on his pants and then just holding onto his own knees for lack of anything else to do with his hands. “Thanks,” said Spencer, and crawled in. He wasn’t as thin as he’d been back when he’d first started working with the department; after some creative squirming, he still only seemed to be able to fit his upper body and some of one leg underneath the desk, the other one and a half legs sticking out towards the spot where McNab had been crouching. His shoulders were up almost against the underside of the desk; his neck was bent at an odd angle so that his head would fit; one of his hands was planted right next to Carlton’s foot, to keep him from falling forward. Carlton looked at his face, and was met with a grin that suggested Shawn did this kind of thing every day. “Nice place you got here,” he said.

“You aren’t psychic,” said Carlton hoarsely.

“Not so loud, Lassie,” said Shawn, “someone will figure us out.”

“Why’d you say _I_ was psychic?” said Carlton.

“Why’d you go along with it?” Shawn shot back, and then immediately said, “No, you don’t have to answer that. I am curious, though, why here?” Carlton frowned at him a little in confusion, and Shawn went on, “I know most of it. I know you didn’t go fishing, I know you went to Tom Blair’s Friday night and I have a pretty good idea of what happened next, but I don’t know how it ended, and I don’t know why you can’t sleep at your own house. Why you have to be at the station.”

“He had my wallet,” said Carlton, and found that he couldn’t stop there. “He had my wallet and my keys and he has my phone and when he was done he dropped me off _at my house_ and I don’t know when because I was unconscious when he did but he knows who I am and where I live and he killed the next two and what if I was the mistake, what if he wants me again?” This was, he realized, the first time he’d said anything about it out loud. It was a relief and too much all at the same time; something was roaring in his ears, and his vision was blurring and grayish and he couldn’t see the desk or, “Shawn? _Shawn_?”

“Woah, Lassie,” said Shawn’s voice. Carlton wondered when Spencer had become Shawn in his mind. “Carlton. I’m right here.” There was a pressure on his arms, and then someone was holding both of his hands, tentatively. Carlton let his head fall forward and found a broad, polo-shirt covered shoulder, and stayed there.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Other things I made up in this story: the locking mechanism for the SBPD station doors.


	7. Chapter 7

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> If any of you finished the last chapter and thought "wow, we still have five chapters to go," imagine how I (a person who, again, has _never seen the show I'm writing about_ ) felt when I realized how much I was writing! Anyway, here's some more.

Shawn was pretty sure that he’d never felt so many conflicting emotions in his life as he was feeling in that moment. He had spent the night coming to terms with the fact that he...cared about Lassie, care was a good place to start. And he’d spent the last couple days piecing together the facts of Lassie’s (probably) drugging, (technically) kidnapping, and (almost certainly) sexual assault. And now the object of his...care was wedged under a desk with him, with his face buried in Shawn’s shoulder, but not for any good reasons. Lassie’s hands were shaking, but he hadn’t pulled away when Shawn had taken them, so Shawn adjusted his grip until both of Lassie’s hands were pressed between both of his own. The shaking started to calm down.

“Carlton?” said a voice that, just days ago, Shawn would still have been drawn to like a fruit bat to a pineapple.

“Detective O’Hara!” said Buzz, who sounded like he was moving to intercept her. Good old Buzz. “They’re under the desk, um, they need a six foot diameter--I mean, radius.”

“‘They’ who?” said Jules, and Shawn heard her heels clopping around the desk. He stuck his left leg out a little further than it already was and managed to hook Lassie’s desk chair with his toes and drag it in front of the desk, hiding them a bit.

“Sorry, Jules!” he called as the pants half of her pant suit came into view. “Psychic business, we’ll be out soon!”

“Shawn, are you--is Carlton in there?” asked Jules, not coming within the invisible six foot--or twelve foot, whatever--circle, but bending down a little and trying to peer past the chair.

“It’s fine, O’Hara,” growled Carlton--growled _Lassie_ , and that was weird, Shawn wasn’t ready for his brain to switch over to “Carlton” full time yet. He’d lifted his head from Shawn’s shoulder and sounded moderately more in control of himself than he had a minute ago, gasping Shawn’s name--and that was another thing Shawn wasn’t going to think about right now.

“OK,” said Jules, sounding doubtful. “If you say so. Um, let me know if you, uh, divine anything.”

Lassie and Shawn looked at each other as the heels clopped away. “I think she knows,” said Lassie. He didn’t pull his hands back, so Shawn didn’t let go of them.

“Jules?” said Shawn. “I don’t know, she’s believed me for this many years.”

“Yeah, but I never did,” said Lassie. “She’s suspicious.”

“Maybe so,” said Shawn, “but we can worry about that later. Listen, Lassie,” he went on, lowering his voice even further, “you know the truth now, I can tell you all about my eidetic memory and childhood observation training later, but the important thing is, _you’re right. I’m not psychic_. Which means that if you remember _anything_ from last weekend that can help us catch the guy who, uh, took you, who we both think is the same one who killed these two Lassie-look-alikes, you have to tell me. _Any_ clue is better than what we have right now.”

Lassie’s hands were shaking again, so Shawn held them a little tighter. His face screwed up, too, but this quickly turned out to be a look more of frustration than anything else. “I can’t. I actually can’t, I was drugged and then it was dark--I only really saw him when he ‘helped’ me out of the bar, but I was pretty out of it, I think he was just--an average looking white man?”

“That tracks with what I found out, unfortunately,” said Shawn. “When’d you get the black eye?”

“I don’t know,” said Lassie, and then, “I fought back later--it was in a bedroom but it was dark, it could have been a house or a hotel, I don’t _know_ , and he punched me--I was still groggy--and he said if I kept fighting he would _make_ me lie still, and showed me a syringe.” He looked up at Shawn and wow, Shawn had not been kidding way back when about doing cannonballs into those blue eyes, and also, he was almost at his daily quota for serious conversions and it was only, like, 7:45 in the morning. “That’s why I thought the first one was an accident,” said Lassie. “He must have kept fighting, so he got drugged again. I...I didn’t.”

“OK, hang on,” said Shawn, “you _made it out alive_ , which is more than those two we found, and which I personally am pretty happy about. You did what you had to do, Lass.”

Lassie let out a shaky breath and put his forehead on Shawn’s shoulder again. Shawn let him for as long as he could, but his neck was definitely getting a little cramped, and this was also the longest he’d held anyone’s hand in a very long time, possibly longer than he’d ever held Jules’s during their brief relationship. He tried to be gentle when he let go of Lassie’s and started to squirm out from under the desk. He was almost out when one more thing occurred to him, and, OK, he was now going to be well over his serious conversation quota for the day but also he needed to ask. “Did you, uh, get tested?” he asked. “For--you know.”

“I don’t need to,” said Lassie. “I mean, to be extra careful, I should, but--they’re not going to find any DNA evidence on either of those corpses. I remember that much.”

“OK,” said Shawn, and stopped himself from saying, “Good,” because it wasn’t really, and he was going to need to find Gus soon and just--quote an entire movie with him or something, because that was the least serious thing he could think to do.

***

Spencer--because they weren’t under the desk anymore, and Carlton couldn’t handle the shift it would take to think of him as Shawn _all_ the time--disappeared not long after they both emerged, leaving Carlton to deal with O’Hara’s confused and slightly suspicious looks alone. Luckily, although she now had something else to be confused about, they weren’t much more suspicious than they’d been earlier in the week.

“Oh, Sweet Lady Justice,” said Carlton, staring at his computer screen once it lit up.

“What is it?” said O’Hara. “Did the tox screens…?”

“It’s only Wednesday,” he moaned.

Not long after that, Spencer reappeared, along with Guster and another set of smoothies that he’d apparently convinced Guster to buy on his way to the station. “Calories,” said Spencer invitingly, unknowingly echoing Carlton’s thoughts from the night before as he shook one of the cups under Carlton’s nose.

Carlton snatched the smoothie from him anyway, took a sip, and then looked at the cup in confusion. “Is this pineapple?”

“Oops,” said Spencer, holding his smoothie away from his head and sticking out his tongue in the most childish “yuck” face that Carlton had ever seen on a grown man. “Switched ‘em. Here.” He plucked the yellow smoothie out of Carlton’s hand and replaced it with the other one, which was...pale pink, like the last one. Carlton frowned at it gently, looked up at Spencer, who was now sucking obscenely on his straw, and then for some reason glanced over at O’Hara’s desk, where Guster was looking back towards them, giving his friend a meaningful look. Carlton shrugged, and drank his smoothie.

He and O’Hara had visited Todd Dougherty’s family the day before, which had been just as devastating as he’d expected. Mrs. Dougherty had provided a lot more information than Carlton had been looking for, but O’Hara nodded sympathetically as she explained that she and her husband took turns occasionally to have a night away from the two-year-old, but that while she, Mrs. Dougherty, had friends who she liked to visit, Todd generally just went to a bar by himself. Eventually, she’d provided a list of the few bars that Todd had liked to visit, but they’d only been able to go to one before O’Hara declared it late enough that they needed to head back to the station. Probably she’d just been reacting to the state Carlton had been in at that point; although he wanted to catch this guy as soon as possible, he hadn’t argued. Once they finished the smoothies, though, he and O’Hara headed out to check out the other two bars.

Carlton slid into the driver’s seat and un-reclined it quickly before O’Hara was fully in the car, hoping she wouldn’t notice how far back it had been. “You’re looking a bit better this morning, partner,” said O’Hara tentatively once they were on the road. “Did you get more sleep last night or something?”

Carlton considered for a moment, running his hand over his face. He’d shaved at some point the night before, and he could feel that he’d missed more than one patch. He still felt like shit, and sleeping on the floor hadn’t really helped that. And yet, having one more person--one person at all--who now knew, basically, what had happened, and who was still going to help him solve the case, meant that he felt a whole lot better than he had yesterday. He rubbed his forehead without really noticing, and registered the sense memory of Shawn’s shoulder there, warm under his polo. “Yeah,” he said, “I slept better.”

The second bar, they struck gold. Well, copper anyway. And it certainly took some digging. The owner was in the back doing paperwork when they knocked, and he gave them the number and address of the bartenders who would have been working Monday night, and then called them back when they were almost out the door because he’d forgotten about a shift change. The first bartender they knocked up (Spencer would probably have suggested a different term) had obviously just woken up; he squinted at the photo of Todd Dougherty in his Santa Barbara Zoo shirt that O’Hara had on her phone and declared he’d never seen the man in his life. The second bartender said, “Oh yeah, Todd, he was there just two days ago.”

O’Hara did the questioning, which was fine with Carlton. Things were looking good; the bartender remembered Todd, and his drink orders, and about where he’d sat, and she also remembered that another guy had come to join him and gotten him a drink. “Um, average,” she said, when O’Hara asked for a description of him. “I’m pretty sure he was white, and that’s about it. Sorry.”

O’Hara scoffed at the second bartender’s lack of observation skills all the way to the car. Carlton was quiet until he unlocked it. “I know it’s a terrible description,” he said, “but I think this average guy is our suspect.”

“He’s our only lead so far,” agreed O’Hara, “but what makes you so sure--oh, right.” She glanced at him knowingly, and Carlton almost started hyperventilating. “Psychic.”

“Um, yeah,” he said. “Yeah, that’s why.”


	8. Chapter 8

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Fun fact, this is saved on my computer as "??psych?" because when I first saved it I was still a little confused at the idea I was writing _Psych_ fanfiction.

Gus was unfortunately not in the best movie-quoting mood. Shawn suspected that it was because Jules had left only about half an hour after Gus had got to the station. “Gus, don’t be a cherry Jolly Rancher,” he said. “You’re sulking.”

“What’s wrong with cherry?” said Gus defensively, just proving to Shawn that he really was in a bad mood.

“You know they’re always the last ones in the bag,” said Shawn. “Watermelon and blue raspberry leave them in the bust.”

“In the _dust_ , and no you haven’t heard it both ways,” said Gus. “I could be doing my actual job right now, Shawn, why did you tell me to come here if we aren’t going to be out trying to solve this, too?”

The truth was that with Lassie and Jules working the bar angle, Shawn wasn’t exactly sure where else to go for new information. Rather than admit this, he dragged Gus to the conference room, where a couple junior detectives had been assigned to keep going through old missing persons cases, in case the first body had been kidnapped a while ago. The police had put a mediocre sketch of the corpse as he might have looked alive on the evening news last night, too, but no one had called in any useful tips. Shawn was still pretty sure Mr. Dead Guy hadn’t been taken until the night before he’d been killed, but he also didn’t know why no one had come to the police about their missing husband or father or whoever yet.

One of the detectives sighed as Shawn and Gus popped up the doorway; apparently two hours of looking through old paper copies was two hours too many for him. “This is pointless,” he said to the other detective, pushing his chair back and taking off his reading glasses to rub his eyes. Shawn’s eyes followed the detective’s hand, and then stayed on his face when his hand dropped. The reading glasses had left two little red marks on the inside corners of his eyes. Shawn thought back to the first crime scene of the case, and then slapped a hand over his own eyes.

“I can’t see!” he cried out, sticking his other arm straight out in front of him. “It’s Mr. Dead Guy--I mean, the John Deere, he’s trying to reach me!” He moved around a bit, bouncing off of Gus and also the doorway, then took his hand off of his face and stared straight ahead as though he still couldn’t tell where he was. “Everything’s blurry--Gus, help! Magic Head!”

He groped towards Gus until his friend obligingly put his head under one of Shawn’s waving hands. “It’s still blurry,” he yelled. The chief had come out of her office to see what he was doing. “I need more than this, I need--glasses! That’s it, John Deere wore glasses!”

“John Deere is a brand of tractor,” said Gus, under his hand.

“It’s also what you call unidentified corpses, Gus, everyone knows that,” said Shawn, patting him on the head and then letting go.

“Are you sure, Mr. Spencer?” said the chief, coming into the conference room. “It’s not a huge lead, but maybe it will help jog people’s memories; we can add it to the sketch.”

“As crystal,” said Shawn. Gus muttered a correction, but Shawn couldn’t hear it well enough to bother responding.

“Hey,” said the junior detective who wore reading glasses, now looking closely at one of the crime scene close-ups, “it _does_ look like he had glasses, you can see the marks on his nose, here.”

“All right,” said Chief Vick, and looked like she was going to say something else, but she was cut off by someone clearing their throat tremulously right outside the conference room.

Lassie and Jules had brought Shawn and Gus up-to-date on what they’d found about the identity of Todd Dougherty before they left, so it didn’t take much detective work for Shawn to look at the small, sad-looking woman standing in the doorway, note her wedding ring and Santa Barbara Zoo admittance bracelet, and decide that she was Mrs. Dougherty, probably coming from making a formal identification of her husband’s body, which they’d waited to have her do until after the autopsy. “I’m sorry,” she said, “but, are you Chief Vick? Only they said you might know what happened to my husband’s wedding ring. Todd Dougherty?”

“He wasn’t wearing a ring,” said Shawn, and then quickly put his finger to his eyebrow when the chief looked at him. “The spirits reminded me.”

“He didn’t wear it on his finger,” said Mrs. Dougherty, “he worked too much with his hands, so he kept it on a necklace, but he always wore that. Always. But it wasn’t on him and your, um, man in the basement says that he never saw it.”

Chief Vick looked back at Shawn, who shook his head, mentally reconstructing the whole crime scene in case the necklace had been thrown off in the fall. There was always the possibility it had caught in one of the scrubby bushes on the bluff, but he could see the broken path that Todd’s body had taken clearly in his mind, and it wasn’t there. “It wasn’t on him,” he said. “The spirits are saying that he didn’t have it on when he was, um, left at the beach.”

“I’m sorry, Mrs. Dougherty,” said the chief, gently steering the woman with her and away from the crime-scene-photo wallpapered conference room. “If we find out what happened to it, we’ll be sure to tell you. Now, did Mr. Strode give you any details about when we can release the body?”

Shawn and Gus left the conference room, too, leaving the detectives to go back through the files and look for missing people who wore glasses. “I’ll text Jules about the necklace,” said Gus quickly, and then added, with a sly grin, “unless you wanted to call Lassie about it?”

“I can’t,” said Shawn absentmindedly, thinking about missing glasses and necklaces, “he, uh, lost his phone…” He stopped walking suddenly; Gus, who was texting and walking, went on several steps before noticing that he was alone. “Ask her when they’ll be back,” said Shawn, speed walking to catch up. “I need to talk to Lassie.”

***

As soon as Carlton and O’Hara made it through the door of the station, Spencer was on them. Not literally, for a change; instead, he displayed his new tendency to actually sort of respect Carlton’s personal space, which suddenly made a lot more sense after their conversation under the desk that morning. He did stand right in front of them and effectively force them to stop walking, though.

“Heeyy,” he said, “Jules, Lassie, just the people I was needing to see! Jules, I have to borrow his Lassiness for a minute, psychic business, you know how it is. Don’t worry, though, Gus can keep you company.”

Carlton, who seemed to be noticing things about Spencer now, noticed that although he did reach out to grab the sleeve of Carlton’s blazer at this point, he did so at about half the speed he normally moved. Carlton looked back as Spencer towed him gently away, and saw that O’Hara and Guster were now standing next to each other, and that, oddly, both of them were giving him a look as though they knew exactly what was going on. He was pretty sure that they didn’t, but he also really wondered what the heck they _thought_ was going on.

“You said he has your phone,” said Shawn, once he’d pulled Carlton into an observation room and closed the door.

“What?” said Carlton.

“Earlier--under the desk,” said Shawn, “you said he _had_ your wallet and keys but he _has_ your phone. Right? Sorry, but I think it’s important.”

Carlton realized that Shawn was still holding his sleeve, and shook him off. “Right--I requisitioned a new one. It hasn’t come in yet.”

“So it was department-issued?” said Shawn.

“Yes,” said Carlton. “I don’t see why it matters--he took the phones off of the others, too. And their wallets.”

“Yeah, but they were different,” said Shawn. “He took their phones and wallets so that we couldn’t ID them right away. But he also took one other thing from each of them, a personal thing, like a trophy--Mr. Dead Guy is missing his glasses, and Todd Dougherty is missing his wedding ring necklace. You, he left alive--sorry--so he didn’t _need_ to keep any identifying materials, because you know who you are. But he kept your phone--which was issued by the SBPD, so it’s at least a little personal. Unless he kept anything else?” 

“No--well, some of my clothes, I think,” said Carlton. “I was dressed, um, kind of like the corpses when I woke up in my yard.” Shawn grimaced, and looked like he was going to apologize, but Carlton was already thinking further. Like this, putting clues together and ignoring the fact that they were clues from his own assault, he felt more on top of his job than he had in days. “I’m sure he’s turned it off. But if we track the GPS--SBPD cell phones send their last known coordinates to a database when they die, or turn off. Just in case.”

“That,” said Shawn, “sounds like a serious and kind of disturbing breach of privacy. But in this case, it might be very useful.”

***

Shawn looked at Lassie out of the corner of his eyes as they walked back to the bullpen. He seemed to be doing a lot better than he had that morning, but Shawn himself was running on zero sleep and a pineapple smoothie and although he was currently a sugar packet away from bouncing off the walls, he knew a crash was coming some time in the distant future. He suspected that Lassie was due a crash, too. Hiding under his own desk didn’t count; if anything, it had been a delaying tactic.

“Shawn,” said Gus when they reached Lassie’s desk, “Juliet and I are going to pick up some lunch and bring it back, want to come?”

Shawn looked at Juliet’s stubborn, slightly pink face and Gus’s not-at-all welcoming glare and suspected that if he had a “vision” of Gus asking Jules if she wanted to go grab lunch and Jules saying, “Should we ask if Shawn wants to go?” he wouldn’t be too far off. He also suspected that she would have just been being polite. “You guys go ahead,” he said. “I’ve still got some psychicing to do with Lassie, bring me back something good!”

“You know I will,” said Gus, now looking 400 times more cheerful than he had all day so far. Luckily, he was too distracted by walking Jules out the front door to give Shawn another of those meaningful, Lassie-related looks he’d been giving lately.

Lassie glanced around as he went to his computer, but most of the other bullpen residents were also on their lunch breaks, so there was no one within earshot as he sat down to open the appropriate GPS programs. Shawn came around the desk, too, and leaned on the back of Lassie’s chair. As a matter of course, he memorized what Lassie was clicking on and his password, but he was distracted some by the tip of Lassie’s left ear, which was right under his chin. Shawn suddenly remembered some of the insomnia-producing things he’d thought the night before, and was very glad that Gus was gone and couldn’t see him starting to blush.

“There,” said Lassie after a minute, and they both stared at the screen. Lassie’s phone had last registered its location in an apartment block in the northeast part of Santa Barbara. It felt almost too easy.

“Is that where he took you?” Shawn muttered almost directly into the ear next to his mouth.

Lassie’s face screwed up again in what Shawn was starting to recognize as his trying-to-remember face. “I don’t think so,” he muttered back. “I don’t think we drove that far from the bar. I was blacking out a lot, though.”

Shawn grimaced a little, still staring at the map. A problem about what they were going to do with this information was occurring to him slowly. He wondered if Lassie, who was starting to frown even more deeply than his habitual grumpy expression, was thinking the same thing, and wished just a little that he really was psychic. “Listen, Lassie,” he said, “let me and Gus check it out.” He realized that it sounded a bit like he was trying to be protective, which may actually have been one of his motivations, but he shoved that motivation way down deep with his feelings about Lassie’s blue eyes and vulnerable-looking ears. “Even if I have a vision telling you and Jules to go here,” he said, “we don’t know what ‘here’ really is. And the only thing we think you’ll find is your cell phone, and even that’s a maybe. But if _I_ go here, I can figure out where we go next.”

Shawn realized as he spoke that, protective thoughts aside, he was asking Lassie to ignore a possible lead, and trust him and Gus to go conduct a probably illegal search to collect clues that were directly related to Lassie’s own assault. But he also didn’t know what else they could do. Lassie kept scowling at the screen; Shawn took his hand off the back of the chair, and put it on Lassie’s shoulder, instead. Lassie turned and lifted his head, and made eye contact. “Carlton,” said Shawn, “let me do this.”

Lassie nodded, just a jerk of his head, and didn’t look away. They were still in the same position a moment later, when Jules and Gus burst through the station doors carrying sandwiches.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I know nothing about how cell phone GPS works and even less about cop-specific cell phone GPS (which is a thing I made up). Also don't know whether or not police departments even issue cell phones.


	9. Chapter 9

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Another fun fact (I am full of them): At one point, my outline for the entire rest of this work (as in, Chapters 9-11) read:  
> \- Uhhh find the guy  
> \- ???  
> \- profit
> 
> Don't worry, though, I did a little work on it between then and now.

“Shawn,” said Gus, “c’mon, man, I’m not keeping things from _you_ just because I like _Jules_. You and I are partners. They’re just--arm candy.”

Shawn snorted at the idea of Lassie _or_ Jules as arm candy, but Gus had a point, especially since he was now driving across town at Shawn’s direction to check out a lead that Shawn had so far told him nothing about. Shawn decided to come clean. Well, mostly clean. Well, slightly grimey, as opposed to covered in muck.

“It’s not what you’ve been thinking,” he said. “I mean, Lassie is--I might like Lassie, I don’t know, but the important thing is that I figured out a secret. And it’s Lassie’s secret, not mine, so I can’t tell you, but it’s related to this whole case, and it’s related to where we’re going, which is a place where our murderer might live? But also he might just have dumped something here.”

“We’re driving to the _murderer’s house_?” said Gus, looking like he was about to pull over right there, and totally skipping over the “I might like Lassie” piece of Shawn’s confession, which was a plus.

“The murderer’s _apartment building_ , and then only maybe,” said Shawn soothingly. Well, he thought it was soothing. “Listen, we don’t have to do much, we just need to convince the super that we have a legitimate need to get into every apartment on the left side of the building and look around. I was thinking we could be investigating an allegation of black mold on that half of the building. I can be a lawyer, and you can be the mute handyman I’ve hired.”

“Shawn, that is racist as hell, and if either of us is dressed like a lawyer right now, it’s me,” said Gus.

“Fine, but I’m not being the handyman,” said Shawn. “What if you’re a, uh, mold expert?”

“Hi,” said Shawn, about twenty minutes later. “I’m Shawn Spencer, Esquire, and this is my _junior_ partner, Pullme Pushyou.”

About five minutes after that, the super was letting them into an empty first floor apartment. “Dr. Doolittle, Shawn, really?” hissed Gus. “And it’s a push-me-pull-you in the books, you know.”

“I’ve heard it both ways,” Shawn muttered back, looking around quickly at the knitted doilies on every surface and what seemed to be small shrines set up to individual grandchildren. “And unless he has more issues than I thought, this is not our guy.”

The GPS coordinates had been specific enough to limit the search to a third of the apartment building, which was still a lot of apartments. The elevator was out. The super, who looked about ninety-five, led them to the fifth floor and unlocked the final apartment with the exact same sour expression he’d had the entire time. Shawn and Gus wheezed behind him.

“Well?” said Gus out of the corner of his mouth as they stood in the doorway. Shawn shrugged and scanned the living room methodically. The super hadn’t let them go through all the bedrooms or anything, which was disappointing, but Shawn thought he might have what he needed already. Just in case, he took a few steps into the room and then, out of the super’s line of sight, stopped, closed his eyes, and mentally ran through the apartments again. 

“We need to go back to the second floor,” he said when they came back out. Gus, who didn’t know what they were looking for, gave him a beseeching look as the super shrugged, locked the door, and headed back to the stairwell. “Hey, it’s on the way,” he pointed out to Gus as they started down.

“Are you telling me we could have skipped the other three flights of stairs?” Gus muttered back.

***

Carlton was antsy. They’d put something on the news the night before with a drawing of their John Doe, asking for people to call in if they recognized him, and he and O’Hara had spent the last couple hours going through the messages that had been taken throughout the day. None of them were helpful, which might have been because the drawing was terrible, or it might have been because they hadn’t drawn him with glasses. Normally they would have waited another several days to put anything on the news, but with a second corpse showing up in the same spot, with the same apparent injuries and COD, they’d wanted any clues they could get.

The drug store down the street from the bar where Todd Dougherty had met an average looking man had security cameras that showed part of the sidewalk, and O’Hara had just pulled the footage up on her computer. “Get McNab to go through it,” suggested Carlton, standing behind her. It was grainy and black and white, and it was going to be almost impossible to recognize Todd, let alone someone for whom their best description was “average.”

“Carlton,” started O’Hara, sounding disapproving, and then stopped and sighed. “That might be the best thing to do.”

Her cell phone rang just as she finished talking, and Carlton flinched at the sudden noise, and then scowled automatically when she gave him a concerned look while she answered. “Gus?” she said.

“Hey, Jules,” Guster’s voice came through tinnily, audible where Carlton was hovering behind her, “Shawn had a vision that led us to this motel, I think you’re gonna want to come check it out--hey! Shawn!”

There was a scrabbling noise, and then Spencer was talking. “Jules? Is Lassie there, too? OK, so the trash gets collected on Saturday nights--tell him that, it’s important. But I’m sensing there’s still some stuff in the dumpster you’ll want to see. Gus’ll text you the address.”

“Did you understand all of that?” said Jules when she’d hung up.

“When have I ever understood something Spencer has said?” Carlton scoffed, and hoped very hard that any of his own clothing that might have ended up in this dumpster had been left there before Saturday night.

The motel was in a less reputable part of the city, and looked pretty run-down. Guster’s company car was immediately obvious because it was also the only car in the lot. There was a small, currently dark office at the end of the long, low building, then rows of room doors opening directly to the parking spaces, and a dumpster on the other side of the lot. Spencer was already sitting up on top of the dumpster, but it looked like Guster had managed to convince him to wait for the detectives before they actually started pulling trash out. Carlton looked around as he and O’Hara walked over. He had been half-hoping that the motel would look familiar, but he had very few memories in between leaving Tom Blair’s and waking up on a bed in a dark room, and the uninspiring parking lot wasn’t prompting any more.

“Finally!” said Spencer, in his normal uninhibited way; “Let’s go dumpster diving,” but Carlton didn’t miss the look Spencer shot him when neither Guster nor O’Hara were looking. It seemed to ask, simultaneously, “You OK?” and “Is this familiar at all?” Carlton shrugged.

Suspiciously, Spencer seemed to know exactly which trash bags they needed to open, which at least saved them the time and smell of digging through the entire accumulated pile of trash. The trash bags themselves looked like all the others, and had presumably been provided by the motel. The contents were two cell phones, two wallets, two pairs of men’s underwear, a sweater, and multiple used condoms per bag. “ _There’s_ DNA evidence,” said Carlton, looking at the condoms, and then he walked away.

Behind him, O’Hara started to say his name, but Spencer cut her off. “He’s receiving a vision,” he said. “Let him go for now.”

Carlton wasn’t sure how long he’d been sitting on the trunk of his Crown Vic and looking at the ground when Spencer’s sneakers came into view. “Hey,” said Spencer softly, “you can take off the gloves, Jules is bagging all the evidence.”

Carlton looked over towards the dumpster and saw O’Hara and Guster--who did not look like he was enjoying the fragrance--kneeling next to it, labelling evidence bags. “How’d you figure it out?” he said. “How did you know to come here?”

“Well,” said Shawn, coming over to lean on the trunk next to him, “I looked inside a bunch of apartments, and I’m not going to tell you how because a man needs _some_ mysteries. And in one of them where the liver was away at work--you know, the person who lives there--”

“Resident?” said Carlton.

“Yeah, liver,” said Shawn. “There was a necklace with a ring on it and a pair of glasses and a dark cell phone sitting out--on the table by the door, actually, which seemed pretty blatant but I guess he’s cocky. Um. Poor choice of words?”

Carlton actually laughed a little, but he thought it was more because Shawn was looking at him and talking to him and because he was standing close enough for Carlton to feel Shawn’s body heat through his pants leg more than because of any word choice, poor or otherwise. Shawn looked startled and pleased. “The important thing is, I knew it was the right place, so I looked around and saw a motel key, a TV Guide, an SBCH lanyard, and a flier for this motel. So Gus and I came here. And I _might_ have looked at all the trash bags and guessed at what was in them from their shapes before we called.”

“After you saw the...trophies, how long did it take to notice the rest?” asked Carlton, fascinated. This was so much better than fake psychic convulsions.

“Oh, uh--ten seconds?” said Shawn.

Carlton gaped, but he couldn’t say anything because O’Hara and Guster were walking towards them, O’Hara carrying the bags and Guster looking something up on his phone. “He’s on sabbatical,” said Guster triumphantly when they got close enough. “John Doe is a professor at UCSB, and he’s on sabbatical this semester.”

“He probably doesn’t live with anyone,” said O’Hara, “and it looks like he’s supposed to be travelling soon, so no one was expecting him to contact them for days, or even months. No wonder no one noticed he was missing.”

“Whaat!” said Guster, and held out a fist that O’Hara shifted evidence bags to bump with her own.

“That’s adorable,” said Spencer, pushing away from the Crown Vic and clapping his hands, “now Gus, dumpster diving really works up my appetite, so I think that it’s about time for you and I to go in search of some jerk chicken.”

“Wait,” said Carlton, and then wasn’t sure why. Spencer and Guster had found the evidence; it wasn’t their job to process it, and it certainly wasn’t their habit to hang out for the boring parts of police work. “Never mind.”

“Don’t worry, Lassie,” said Spencer flippantly, “I’ll call you guys if I have another vision before the morning.”


	10. Chapter 10

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> CW: non-con touching/groping after the third ***
> 
> Thanks again to everyone commenting/kudos-ing/reading! This is up a little later than I meant it to be but for once it was because of circumstances out of my control; there were power outages where I live. Almost there, folks!

“All right, bud,” said Shawn, three blocks away from the motel, “we’re gonna need to get that jerk chicken to-go.”

“What?” said Gus, and then, after a single glance at the passenger seat, “Oh no, uh-uh, Shawn, we are _not_ going back to that creepy motel once it gets dark out.”

“Nice one, are you sure _you’re_ not psychic?” said Shawn. “Sorry, buddy, but I think we have to if we want to prevent another murder.”

“No one got killed _last_ night,” said Gus. “At least, as far as we know.”

“Yeah, I think he got scared by the news segment with the picture of Mr. Dead Guy,” said Shawn, thinking back to the page that the TV Guide had been open to. “But he went three in a row, and he’s getting more confident every time. I don’t think he’ll hold out tonight, especially since we figured out who Mr. Dead Guy is, so he isn’t going to be on TV again.”

“ _Three_ in a row?” said Gus.

“Three, two, whatever, you know I’m bad with numbers,” said Shawn airily. “Listen, as soon as we see anything we can call Jules, but _I_ , at least, am going to sit in a motel parking lot and eat jerk chicken tonight, I hope you’ll join me.”

In the end, they parked across the street. It was less conspicuous, and it made Gus feel safer. As soon as they parked, Shawn opened one of the variety of caffeinated sodas that he’d bought--well, Gus had paid--to go along with the chicken. It wasn’t his first stakeout after an all-nighter, but he was starting to feel the lack of sleep, just a little. “Shawn, you are _not_ peeing in a bottle in my car again,” said Gus, “so don’t drink too much.”

“Relax, Gus, I’ll race myself.”

“I hope you mean pace.”

“I’ve heard--” Shawn started, but Gus reached across and shoved a piece of chicken into his mouth to shut him up.

***

Carlton watched his cursor blinking. After a minute, he remembered that he was supposed to be typing. He had to re-read what he’d written so far to remember _what_ to type, and found that at least an hour into starting the paperwork, all he’d done was describe the phone call from Guster that had led them to the dumpster.

“Hey, partner,” said O’Hara, dropping a hand on his shoulder, and he flinched so hard that he knocked his coffee off his desk and onto her feet.

“Sorry, sorry,” he said, pushing his chair back--into her shins--dropping to his knees, and trying to keep the coffee from running into the cables under his desk by corralling it with his hands. This worked about as well as he probably should have expected.

“Hey, it’s fine,” said O’Hara, all concern and gently tugging hands. She tugged him up, away from the desk, and towards the sink in the break room, talking to McNab over her shoulder to tell him to grab a mop.

“Sorry,” said Carlton again, watching the water sluice coffee off of his hands, and lamenting the stains in the cuffs of his shirt. At least his jacket had been safely on the back of his chair.

“It’s really fine,” said O’Hara. “I am worried about you, though.” He tried a glare, but his heart wasn’t in it. “I mean, I know it’s late--It’s after 9, I’m tired, and you look tired-er. Tired-er? That sounded like something Shawn would say.”

Carlton grunted and looked back at his hands, and managed to mostly avoid flinching this time when she put her hand on his shoulder again. “Is something going on with you and Shawn? I know--well, I knew you guys were getting friendlier, but it seems like you’ve been really close lately. Maybe it’s just because you’re psychic now? I thought he might be good for you--you might be good for each other, actually--but if he’s done something to hurt you--”

“ _What_?” said Carlton, suddenly ten times more alert. “You think Shawn--you think Spencer and I--what?”

O’Hara looked like she was trying not to laugh. “You know, that sounds pretty similar to how Gus said Shawn reacted when he asked him about it.”

“O’Hara,” said Carlton, and then her phone rang.

“Jules,” said Gus. “Is Lassie there? Put me on speaker. Guys, I’m outside the motel again, Shawn and I came back, we were staking it out, and Shawn was going to go in the lobby to pee, and then this other guy pulled up with _another_ guy who looks pretty out of it in his car, and he went in the lobby, and Shawn went after him! He said, ‘What an average looking man,’ and then went, and I can’t see in the lobby windows very well but they’re both still in there and it’s been at least five minutes and Shawn never takes more than two to pee.” His voice rose in pitch and speed throughout his monologue, so that Carlton could hardly understand him by the end.

“Gus, stay right there,” said O'Hara, meeting Carlton’s eyes over her phone, which she was holding between them. “Don’t move, just stay there, watch the lobby, we’re on our way. Call if anything changes.”

***

Average Man--Shawn was starting to think of him almost as a sort of super villain--was trying to tell the night clerk in the tiny motel lobby, an old man who was honest-to-God looking over the top of a newspaper at him, that he’d paid for the room for the whole week already, but he’d lost his room key and needed a new one. This made sense, because Shawn had his original room key in his pocket.

“Hey, do you have a bathroom I can use?” Shawn asked the clerk, hopping in place a little. The clerk took in his urgent motion, and gestured with the newspaper to a single-person restroom behind the desk. Shawn went and used it, because he’d drunk a lot of soda and really did need to go.

When he came back out, the clerk seemed to have decided to give Average Man the benefit of the doubt. He was going through a ring of keys on his belt, looking for the one to unlock a lockbox next to the desk--the motel was old enough that it still used actual metal keys, instead of key cards. “Hey,” said Shawn to Average Man, “your friend in the car doesn’t look so good.”

“He’s drunk,” said Average Man dismissively. “I just need to get him a place to lie down.” The clerk had finally located the lockbox key on his ring, and was now trying to decipher which of hundreds of poorly-labelled keys in the lockbox was the right one. Shawn glanced out one of the small windows, but he couldn’t see the Blueberry. He knew that Gus would have called Jules by now, even though he hadn’t specifically said to do so. They probably had another five to ten minutes until she and Lassie got here, depending on if they used the sirens or not.

“Here it is,” said the clerk, holding up a key. Average Man reached out for it. “113, right?”

“112,” said Average Man, dropping his hand. “I left some things in there.” The clerk turned back to the lockbox, grumbling.

Shawn stood still right outside the bathroom door, trying to be unobtrusive, and thinking. If he let the clerk hand the right key over, Average Man would take his latest victim into room 112. Within five minutes, at least two SBPD detectives would arrive to arrest him. He didn’t look armed, aside from wherever he was hiding a syringe, and he wouldn’t kill his victim without doing a lot of other things first. Those other things were the sticking point, though. Shawn had glanced into Average Man’s car as he walked in; the unconscious guy in the passenger seat didn’t look that much like Lassie, but he did have dark hair. Average Man obviously had a type. Shawn hadn’t been able to do anything to protect Lassie, hadn’t even known that he needed protecting, but he could maybe keep some similar things from happening to this guy.

When the clerk stood back up, holding the right key this time, Shawn took a step forward and snatched it from him. “Weird,” he said, holding it up, and ignoring the clerk’s attempt to grab it back. “Looks just like this one I have in my pocket.”

Average Man looked confused and a little angry; the clerk was the one who connected some of the dots for him. “Hey,” he said, “I’ve seen you in the paper. Aren’t you that psychic who works with the police sometimes?”

“Shawn Spencer, psychic detective,” said Shawn, and then thought, what the hell. One extra guy wasn’t much of an audience, but it was better than nothing. He pressed both keys to his forehead, and moaned.

“What the hell?” said Average Man out loud. “There’s no such thing as psychics.”

“You wish,” said Shawn. “These keys are telling me strange tales about room 112. There are restless spirits in that very room!”

“Really?” said the clerk, whose name tag said “Ned.”

“Yes, Ned!” said Shawn. “Room 112. The professor and the zookeeper cry out for vengeance.”

“How did you know my name?” said Ned.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” said Average Man.

“Really?” said Shawn. “I know exactly what you _aren’t_ talking about...that sounded better in my head. Let me put it this way: Lassie was probably the first one, right? Or one of the first, anyway. You can’t get any action when you just try like a normal person, so you came up with a plan; get a room in a motel, roofie a lonely-looking guy at a bar, bring him back to the motel room. Luckily for you,” he thought of the lanyard in Average Man’s apartment, “you work at Santa Barbara Cottage Hospital--probably as an anesthesiologist--so you can get your hands on sketchy, strong drugs pretty easily. Just in case they get frisky, though, you bring a syringe with some _extra_ -strong stuff.”

Shawn glanced sideways at his single audience member; Ned looked almost fascinated. Average Man was at least trying to be impassive. Shawn was starting to feel a little sick, but he kept going. “At first, you didn’t have to use it, except as a threat. The professor was different; he fought back even after you socked him, so you stuck him, too. But you got excited, and gave him too much. You probably freaked out a little, when he died, and dumped his body in the first place you could find. But then you realized that there was an even better dump site right in the same park. And it was easier and a little safer for you than leaving them alive and bringing them home. You killed the zookeeper on purpose. The news segment scared you for a night, but you are one horny motherfucker. That guy in your car was supposed to die tonight, too.”

Average Man took a step back and said, “You can’t prove a thing,” which was the guiltiest phrase Shawn had ever heard.

“Oh, but we can,” said Shawn who, unlike Average Man, was facing the parking lot and had seen the headlights pull in. “You’re an organized man, Average Man. Too organized. Even if your fingerprints aren’t all over their wallets, your DNA will be _all_ up in those condoms.”

“Who’s Average Man?” asked Ned, which Shawn thought was a strange piece to focus on out of everything he’d just said. Then the door opened and Lassie came in, Glock-first.

***

Guster, typically, did not stay where he was. He called again while Carlton was driving; he’d crossed the road and was hiding behind the suspect’s car. He could see Shawn talking to both the suspect, and someone who seemed to be a motel employee. The suspect had his back to the door.

Carlton hadn’t taken his gun to Tom Blair’s on Friday. He hadn’t wanted to be drunk and carrying. Now that he planned to never get drunk again, he also planned to always be carrying. When they got out of the Crown Vic in the motel parking lot, he motioned O’Hara behind him and unholstered his Glock. There was indeed a very average looking man with his back to the lobby door, watching Spencer, who was in the middle of a ‘vision.’ Since Spencer had the suspect’s full attention, Carlton paused for just a second, looking in, to let his eyes adjust. Then, as Spencer seemed to reach the end of what he was saying, he pushed the door open, took one step into the room, and growled, “Freeze.”

The average man turned around. He really was remarkably average; his eyes were dark, neither gray nor brown; he looked middle aged; he was medium tall and medium wide and had medium brown hair. He was also remarkably familiar. Carlton followed his own order, and froze.

“Well, this is a surprise,” said the rapist.

The rapist ignored the gun, took two steps forward, and forced Carlton up against the wall. Carlton forgot about the gun. He gasped and shook and did nothing while the rapist grabbed at him. He grabbed Carlton’s chest and between his legs and pressed their bodies together, and then he leaned up, just a little, and licked Carlton’s neck and said, “I guess I don’t need to bother worrying about DNA evidence any more, _detective_ ,” and then he was gone.

Someone--a woman--was saying, “Carlton? Shawn? _Shawn_!” and two people were on the floor, with the one in the polo shirt on top, hitting, and someone unfamiliar was yelling about police, and now another person was in the room saying, “Shawn, it’s OK, you got him, come on, Shawn.” Carlton slid down the wall to the floor, put his gun carefully down next to him, put his head between his knees, and covered it with his arms. After that, he tried breathing.


	11. Chapter 11

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> CW: minor flashback/panic attack after the third ***

Shawn had always been a little leery, if that was the word, about the whole “brotherhood in blue” thing the police had going on. SBPD officers didn’t even wear blue. He’d never said as much out loud, because Henry would have yelled at him, but he’d thought it. Right now, though, it was proving useful. Phrases like “assaulted an officer” meant that even when their suspect--hell, he’d confessed, their _killer_ \--was brought in to the station with a split lip, a bloody nose, and a black eye, all Chief Vick did was talk quietly to Jules, and then say, “Mr. Spencer, we’ll need a written statement,” and that was that.

Now Shawn and Gus were both sitting in the conference room, which was still covered in crime scene photos, and writing. Shawn’s own writing was made difficult by the ice pack he was trying to balance on his knuckles; eventually he gave up and shifted it to join the one on his left hand.

He was used to making things up in statements--usually visions. The problem was that he usually also knew what had really happened. Not that he couldn’t remember what had happened, memory wasn’t an issue, but Shawn was having a hard time _explaining_ what he’d done. Apparently, something about Lassie’s short, gasping breaths and his wide, wet blue eyes had flipped a switch that made Shawn angry, violent, and really, really stupid.

He stood up and paced around the conference room, aware that Gus was watching him. Logically, the best way to avoid feeling angry and stupid in the future was to make sure that Lassie never ended up like that again. He walked to the doorway of the room and looked towards the bullpen, where Lassie was sitting in a chair with Juliet crouched in front of him, saying something. Then he walked back to the table, picked up his pen, and started writing furiously.

***

Carlton shifted on his chair, looked down at his partner’s concerned, expectant face, and mentally replayed what she’d just said. “I couldn’t tell _anyone_ ,” he said. “I’m sorry, Juliet; Shawn just...figured it out. I didn’t want…” She put her hand over his, where it was resting on his knee. He realized that he was making a fist so tight that his fingernails were cutting into his palm, and relaxed his hand enough to take hers. “He confessed,” he whispered, “he murdered two men, he had another one with him, I don’t need to testify, no one else needs to know. It doesn’t matter.”

“It _does_ matter,” said Juliet, “but you shouldn’t need to testify. The chief probably doesn’t know the whole story...yet, but she is going to make you have a psych eval, even just after what happened tonight.”

Carlton rubbed his free hand over his face. “I know,” he said. He owed his partner a better explanation than what he’d managed to stammer out so far, which was mostly confirming what she’d figured out. _Spencer_ owed his partner a better explanation; was she going to even believe in the so-called psychic anymore, now that she knew for sure that Carlton wasn’t? But he couldn’t face any of it tonight. “I’ll figure it out, I’ll tell you about it, too, but right now--God, Juliet, I’m tired.”

Juliet opened her mouth, looked like she was about to cry, and then closed it. Before she could try again, Spencer was somehow right behind her. “Hey, Jules, Chief Vick wants you,” he said. “Oh, and so does Gus, but he didn’t say so out loud or anything. Wait, before you go, where’s Lassie’s keys?”

Juliet had driven from the motel to the station. She picked up the keys from Carlton’s desk and tossed them to Spencer, started to move away, then turned back and gave Spencer a hug. “Take care, guys,” she said, with her head against Spencer’s chest but her face turned towards Carlton. Then she was walking briskly towards the chief’s office.

“C’mon, Lassie,” said Shawn. “I’m driving you home.”

***

Driving Lassie’s Crown Vic was weird, but somehow one of the less weird things that had happened in the last several hours. Shawn drummed his fingers on the steering wheel, and glanced sideways. Lassie was slumped in the passenger seat almost as though he was asleep, but Shawn could see that he wasn’t; his eyes were open, and looking back at Shawn.

Shawn looked back at the road and thought. If he really did have feelings for Lassie, he had chosen kind of the worst time possible to figure them out. At least Lassie wasn’t revolted by his presence; if anything, he’d almost seemed comforted by things Shawn had done or said in the last few days, which was good and also unexpected. But he was also recovering from a traumatic experience--heck, Shawn was pretty sure that he was kind of still going through the traumatic experience. He was certainly in no place to start a relationship.

Shawn’s mind shied away from the r-word, but tonight was apparently a night for being brave and dumb, so he made himself think it again. Did he want a relationship with Lassie? Generally, those were pretty scary things. Chasing after Jules had been fun; once he’d actually been dating her, he’d felt a bit out of his depth. But he hadn’t meant to chase after Lassie. He wasn’t even one hundred percent sure Lassie was interested in guys at the best of times, although he could think of a few throwaway statements that suggested he could be. He just knew that he cared about Lassie, kind of like he cared about Gus and kind of like he cared about Jules, and kind of in a way that was uniquely Lassie-flavored. And he knew that, right now, he wanted to take Lassie home and then stick around for a little while. And he didn’t think Lassie would mind.

***

“I’m going to shower,” said Carlton, once Shawn unlocked his front door.

“OK,” said Shawn agreeably. “I’m going to pursue some of your fine histories of the Civil War.”

He wasn’t sure if he believed that Shawn was going to _peruse_ his Civil War books, but, Carlton realized once he reached his bedroom, what it really meant was that Shawn was going to be in his living room, not going anywhere. He didn’t exactly _like_ that he found that comforting, but it was nice to not be alone in his house. Carlton stripped off his suit automatically, considered throwing it out because the rapist had touched it, and then decided that dry cleaning it would be cheaper than buying a new one.

In the bathroom, his clothes from Sunday were still in the trash can. Carlton averted his eyes. The shower was too cold when he got in, so he turned it warmer. Then it was too hot. He faced the spray and felt the touch like a brand on his chest and between his legs; he stumbled back, felt his back hit the wall. This time, he lashed out, eyes closed; something caught his right arm and he tugged and overbalanced; there was a thud and a clatter and water in his face making it hard to breath, and then Shawn was saying, “Lassie? Lassie, Carlton, it’s OK, it’s OK.”

Something light and restraining was on top of him; it shifted a little, and then Shawn said, “I’m going to turn off the water.” The shower shut off. Carlton opened his eyes.

Shawn was crouched in the other half of the bathtub: bare feet, damp jeans and a soaked-through polo shirt. He was holding out a towel in front of him. “You pulled down the shower curtain,” he said. “This might be more comfortable, though. I didn’t want to touch you, I thought it might make it worse.”

Carlton pushed the shower curtain off of himself, and watched Shawn avert his eyes politely, still holding out the towel. He took the towel and wrapped it around himself as best he could without standing up. Then he reached out again, and took Shawn’s wrist, and said, “Shawn.”

Somehow, after that, Shawn was hugging him. Carlton could feel himself shaking, but when Shawn started to let go, saying, “Sorry, sorry,” Carlton said, “Don’t,” and held on.

“Oh, God, Lassie,” said Shawn. “It’s OK now. I mean, it isn’t, it still sucks, and you’ll probably freak out again later and I’m really bad at comforting people, but we got him and he’s at the station and you’re here, and _I’m_ here, and it’s going to be OK.”

“OK,” agreed Carlton, and let himself shake.

***

Lassie gave Shawn a pair of apparently never worn sweatpants and an old SBPD t-shirt to wear, since his clothes had been soaked by the shower. Shawn changed in the bedroom while Lassie got dressed in the bathroom, and then Lassie produced an extra toothbrush, too, and they brushed their teeth at the same time, using Lassie’s watermelon-flavored toothpaste.

When they came out of the bathroom, the alarm clock next to the bed said “12:45.” Lassie went and sat on his bed and looked at it. “Oh yeah, the chief said she doesn’t want to see you before noon tomorrow,” said Shawn. “But when you do go in, you should go straight to her office.”

“OK,” said Lassie, and got into bed. Shawn stood awkwardly at the bathroom door and watched him pull up the covers.

“I’ll just go crash on your couch,” he said eventually.

“Wait,” said Lassie, who was facing the other way with half of his mouth smooshed into his pillow. “Stay?”

“Really?” said Shawn, and took a step towards the bed. “I thought--won’t that be, like if you wake up in the night, won’t you freak out a little?”

“I don’t know,” said Lassie, and rolled over to face him. “But he never--I blacked out so many times, those two days, and then I would wake up and be alone in a bed and think it was a dream or something, and then he’d laugh and--touch me. Touch--just, like, contact, so I know you’re there--that’s OK. It’s the waiting that--”

“All right,” said Shawn. “Here, how’s this?” Lassie had a couple extra pillows; Shawn used them to prop himself up so that he was half sitting, with his legs under the blankets. “You want me to leave the lamp on?”

Lassie rolled further towards him, and threw an arm across Shawn’s waist. “Yes, please,” he mumbled into Shawn’s ribcage. Shawn sat frozen. He wasn’t really sure what to do. Eventually he relaxed a little, and put one hand on Lassie’s back. He knew that he would be asleep soon, too, but the light was making it take a little longer, so for now he watched Lassie’s eyes close slowly. Shawn wound down gradually, rubbing Lassie’s back. Carlton fell asleep.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Wow, that's it! Thank you yet again to everyone who comments and kudos-es and reads. This was written to be read so reading it is honestly the highest compliment you can give.
> 
> I have drafted at least one more one-shot with these goofballs so likely I will be posting more fic in future. But for now I will leave you with this.
> 
> Oh, and I headcanon that this first night, Carlton and Shawn are so exhausted that they just sleep through until morning. But this is already fanfiction, so feel free to make of it what you will.


End file.
